F.  P.  A. 
Pamphlet  No.  31 
Series  of  1924-25 


£ 


British  Policy  in  Egypt 

<» 


DISCUSSED  BY 

Major-Gen’l  Sir  Reginald  EIoskins,  K.  C.  B., 

C.M.G.,  D.S.O. 

and 


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Dr.  Herbert  Adams  Gibbons 


With  Remarks  by 

Rt.  Hon.  Sir  Willoughby  Dickinson,  K.  B.  E. 

Mr.  Bishara  Nahas  Hon.  Henry  Morgenthau 

Mr.  Syud  Hossain  Mufty-Zade  K.  Zia  Bey 
Mrs.  Marguerite  Harrrison 


A  STENOGRAPHIC  REPORT  OF  THE 

72ND  New  York  Luncheon  D  ISCUSSION 
DECEMBER  20,  1924 


of  the 

Foreign  Policy  Association 

national  headquarters 

NINE  EAST  FORTY-FIFTH  STREET 
NEW  YORK 


Speakers 


MAJ.-GEN’L  SIR  REGINALD  HOSKINS,  K.  C.  B., 

C.  M.  G.,  D.  S.  O. 

Nile  Expedition,  1897-99;  1915-19,  with  British  Army  in  Egypt,  serving 
zvith  General  Allenby;  Commander  British  General  Staff  in  Egypt,  1919-23; 
Retired,  1923. 

DR.  HERBERT  ADAMS  GIBBONS 

Former  European  Correspondent,  New  York  Herald;  Author  of  Introduc¬ 
tion  to  World  Politics;  Europe  Since  1918;  The  New  Map  of  Africa. 


Leading  the  Discussion  : 

RT.  HON.  SIR  WILLOUGHBY  H.  DICKINSON,  K.  B.  E. 

Former  Delegate  from  Great  Britain  to  the  League  of  Nations  Assembly; 
Chairman  of  Committee  on  Minorities,  League  of  Nations  Union,  England. 

MR.  JAMES  G.  McDONALD,  Chairman 


SPEAKER  S’  TABLE 


Mufty-Zade  K.  Zia  Bey 

Judge  &  Mrs.  Pierre  Crabites 

Mr.  John  Crane 

Mr.  John  Langdon-Davies 

Sir  Willoughby  &  Lady  Dickinson 

Professor  Edward  Mead  Earle 

Miss  Gertrude  Emerson 

Mr.  Glenn  Frank 

Mr.  &  Mrs.  Jackson  Fleming 

Dr.  &  Mrs.  Herbert  A.  Gibbons 


Mr.  Huntington  Gilchrist 
Professor  Richard  Gottheil 
Sir  Reginald  &  Lady  Hoskins 
Miss  Freda  Kirchwey 
Mrs.  Crane  Leatherbee 
Dr.  Robert  Morss  Lovett 
Mr.  David  Mitrany 
Hon.  Henry  Morgenthau 
Mr.  Bishara  Nahas 
Mr.  Savel  Zimand 


Those  who  took  part  in  the  discussion  were  Mr.  Bishara  Nahas,  an 
Egyptian  Merchant ;  Hon.  Henry  Morgenthau,  former  Ambassador  to 
Turkey;  Mrs.  Marguerite  Harrison,  author  and  lecturer,  who  recently 
returned  from  a  year  in  the  Near  East;  Mr.  Syud  Hossain,  editor  of 
the  New  Orient;  and  Mufty-Zade  Zia  Bey,  a  Turkish  merchant  and  author. 


Ji 


British  Policy  in  Egypt 


MR.  JAMES  G.  MCDONALD,  Chairman 


BEFORE  I  introduce  General  Hoskins,  I  am  going  to  try  to  do  what 
I  am  told  I  must  do,  which  is  to  give  you  the  background  of  Egypt’s 
history,  some  7,000  years  of  it,  in  less  than  seven  minutes. 

I  dispose  of  the  period  prior  to  the  conquest  by  Alexander,  the  period 
of  roughly  four  or  five  thousand  years,  made  up  of  thirty  dynasties,  by 
saying  that  it  is  an  extremely  interesting  period,  but  for  us  has  only  this 
significance,  that  as  early  as  the  sixth  dynasty — about  three  thousand 
years  before  Christ — the  Egyptians  were  extending  their  influence  in  what 
they  then  called  Ethiopia,  which  is  the  present  Northern  Sudan. 

The  two  following  periods,  that  of  the  Romans  down  to  the  middle 
of  the  Seventh  Century  and,  that  of  the  Moslems  down  to  the  Turkish 
Conquest,  need  not  concern  us  here.  Of  the  Turkish  period,  1517  to 
1914,  I  stop  first  to  remind  you  that  Mehemet  Ali,  1805-1849,  was  one  of 
the  makers  of  modern  Egypt.  He  was  important  for  three  things:  First, 
he  loosened,  almost  to  the  breaking  point,  the  ties  between  Egypt  and 
Turkey;  second,  he  began  the  development  of  cotton  raising  in  Egypt; 
and  third,  he  conquered  the  Sudan. 

It  will  be  generally  agreed  that  after  Mehemet  Ali  the  most  important 
Egyptian  figure  in  the  nineteenth  century  was  Ismail,  1863-1879.  He 
made  a  brilliant  beginning;  he  effected  many  reforms  and  modernized 
Egypt  until  as  he  said  it  became  “almost  European.”  The  greatest  achieve¬ 
ment  of  his  reign  was  completion  of  the  Suez  Canal.  Unfortunately  his 
manifold  projects  combined  with  reckless  personal  extravagance  brought 
him  and  his  country  into  hopless  bankruptcy.  In  the  end  he  was  deposed 
by  order  of  the  Sultan.  Just  before  his  deposition  his  shares  in  the  Suez 
Canal  were  purchased  by  Great  Britain — one  of  the  brilliant  diplomatic 
achievements  of  Disraeli,  later  Lord  Beaconsfield. 

Egyptian  bankruptcy  led  directly  to  foreign  intervention  which  during 
the  1870’s  and  the  beginning  of  the  1880’s  took  the  following  forms: 
First,  the  Mixed  Tribunals  which  still  continue,  second,  the  Debt  Com¬ 
mission  representing  French  and  British  financiers,  and  third,  the  Dual 
Control  which  placed  an  Englishman  in  charge  of  revenue  and  a  French¬ 
man  in  charge  of  expenditure.  In  1882  occurred  the  revolt  of  Arabi, 
primarily  against  foreign  influence.  This  was  crushed  by  the  British 
acting  without  the  French  who  had  refused  to  take  part  in  a  joint  opera¬ 
tion.  The  defeat  of  Arabi  ended  the  Dual  Control  and  gave  Britain 
for  the  first  time  a  lone  hand  in  Egypt.  It  should  be  noted  also  that  at 
this  time  Sir  Evelyn  Baring,  later  Lord  Cromer,  came  to  Egypt.  He 
lemained  there  as  British  Chief  Agent  until  1907. 

A  year  later  after  the  crushing  of  the  insurrection  in  the  north,  there 
occurred,  in  1883,  in  the  Sudan  the  revolt  of  the  Mahdi.  An  Egyptian 
army  of  ten  thousand  men  under  an  English  officer,  Colonel  Hicks,  sent 
against  the  rebels,  was  annihilated.  In  1884-85  came  the  tragic  incident 
of  General  Gordon.  He  had  been  in  the  Sudan  for  a  number  of  years 

3 


and  knew  how  to  get  on  with  the  Sudanese  admirably.  He  was  asked 
by  the  British  and  Egyptian  Governments  to  go  to  Khartum,  and  if 
possible  to  effect  the  retreat  of  the  British  and  Egyptian  troops,  besieged 
there.  Gordon  went  to  Khartum.  But  being  brilliant  and  daring  rather 
than  discreet  he  did  not  retreat.  Instead  he  attempted  to  stand  out 
against  the  Mahdi.  As  a  result  the  city  was  taken  and  he  with  eleven 
thousand  of  his  men  were  massacred,  two  days  before  the  arrival  of 
reinforcements. 

Following  this  disaster  Britain  and  Egypt  for  the  next  thirteen  years 
practically  withdrew  from  the  Sudan.  But  in  1898  General  Kitchener 
moving  up  the  Nile  finally  defeated  the  forces  of  Mahdism  at  Omdurman. 
This  victory  led,  however,  to  a  very  dangerous  clash  beween  the  British 
and  French  at  Fashoda.  While  Kitchener  was  advancing  southward 
along  the  Nile,  Captain  Marchand,  a  French  explorer  with  an  indefinite 
commission  from  his  government,  was  moving  across  Africa  to  the  Upper 
Nile.  He  arrived  at  Fashoda  a  few  weeks  before  Kitchener  and  raised  the 
flag  of  his  country  above  the  town.  For  months  it  appeared  not  only 
probable  but  likely  that  war  between  France  and  Britain  would  ensue 
over  the  clash  of  interests  there.  France  eventually  withdrew  and  shortly 
afterwards  arranged  with  Britain  a  delimitation  of  their  respective  spheres 
of  influence  which  has  remained  substantially  the  basis  of  division  be¬ 
tween  the  two  countries  until  now. 

The  victory  of  Kitchener,  and  the  withdrawal  of  the  French  led  to 
the  establishment  for  the  first  time  of  the  British  position  in  the  Sudan 
on  a  definite  basis.  The  so-called  “Anglo-Egyptian  Sudan”  was  to  be 
governed  by  a  sort  of  benevolent  dictatorship.  Sovereignty  was  to  be 
exercised  jointly  by  Britain  and  Egypt.  A  British  Governor-General 
in  command  of  Egyptian  and  British  troops,  with  British  officers  in  all 
except  one  of  the  Provinces  was  to  administer  the  country.  In  the  mean¬ 
time,  of  course,  Britain  was  acting  as  advisor  to  the  ruler  of  Egypt. 
This  anomalous  situation  was  changed  in  1914  by  Britain’s  declaration 
that  Egypt  was  no  longer  a  part  of  the  Turkish  Empire  and  by  the 
establishment  definitely  of  a  British  Protectorate. 

In  1922  Britain  granted  independence  to  Egypt,  but  reserved  for  later 
consideration  four  major  points:  Imperial  communications,  the  Sudan, 
the  protection  of  foreign  interests  and  minorities,  and  the  defense  of 
Egypt.  The  most  important  of  these  for  the  purposes  of  today’s  dis¬ 
cussion  is  the  Sudan.  A  few  weeks  ago  the  British  Commander  in  the 
Sudan,  Sir  Lee  Stack,  was  murdered.  The  day  of  the  funeral  General 
Allenby  delivered  his  ultimatum  to  the  Egyptian  government.  Zaghlul 
Pasha  resigned  and  the  new  ministry  assented  to  the  British  terms. 

I  hope  that  this  analysis  has  not  been  colored.  I  have  given  you  this 
“A  B  C”  of  the  background  of  Egypt’s  history  not  because  I  think  you 
members  of  the  Association  do  not  know  it  already,  but  because  some 
of  your  friends  whom  you  have  brought  with  you  may  need  it! 

We  think  we  are  particularly  fortunate  to  have  as  our  first  speaker 
today  a  man  who  has  lived  in  Egypt  a  great  portion  of  his  life,  who  has 
been  intimately  connected  with  the  British  army  there,  and  who,  there¬ 
fore,  can  give  us  a  sense  of  the  situation  in  Egypt  which  it  would  be  dif¬ 
ficult  for  anyone  without  his  experience  to  give.  Major-General  Sir 
Reginald  Hoskins  was  with  the  Nile  Expedition  in  1897  to  1899,  and 

4 


again  in  Egypt  from  1915  to  1919  with  the  British  army,  serving  with 
General  Allenby.  He  was  Commander  of  the  British  General  Staff  in 
Egypt  from  1919  to  1923,  and  he  retired  from  the  army  last  year. 

General  Hoskins  is  not,  he  tells  me,  an  orator,  and  I  am  glad  that  he 
isn’t.  He  is  not  speaking  on  behalf  of  the  British  government,  and  he 
is  not  speaking — primarily,  at  least — as  a  person  acquainted  with  political 
situations ;  rather  he  is  speaking  as  an  individual,  as  a  former  soldier  who 
will  give  us  as  best  he  may  in  twenty  or  twenty-five  minutes  his  impressions 
of  the  situation  in  Egypt  today:  General  Hoskins.  (Applause.) 

MAJOR-GENERAL  SIR  REGINALD  HOSKINS 

LADIES  AND  GENTLEMEN :  It  is  quite  right,  I  am  not  an  orator, 
^but  I  said  I  would  come  here  and  speak  quite  frankly  as  a  soldier  about 
some  of  the  things  that  I  know  of  the  countries  which  you  are  considering 
today.  I  rather  demurred  when  the  Secretary  of  this  Association  ap¬ 
proached  me.  I  thought  I  couldn’t  fill  the  bill,  but  she  is  very  hard  to 
resist  and  I  said  I  would  come  and  just  make  a  frank  talk. 

I  have  been  in  those  countries  for  the  greater  part  of  my  life,  the  part 
of  my  life  that  I  have  enjoyed  most,  I  think.  I  know  the  people  of  Egypt 
well  and  the  people  of  the  Sudan  very  well.  I  have  very  good  friends 
among  the  Egyptians  and  among  the  Sudanese,  and  among  the  Arabs,  and 
the  only  thing  that  I  really  have  at  heart  is  the  happiness  of  those  peoples. 

The  history  has  been  extraordinarily  well  and  succinctly  put  by  your 
Chairman.  That  saves  me  from  trying  to  do  what  I  thought  I  might  have 
to  do,  a  good  deal  of  preliminary  history  work.  But  in  an  audience  of 
this  kind,  in  a  continent  far  away  from  Africa,  it  is  only  to  be  supposed 
that  a  great  many  of  you  don’t  know  clearly  what  sort  of  country  and 
what  sort  of  peoples  we  are  talking  about,  and  so  I  will  try  to  make  a  little 
atmosphere.  I  will,  so  to  speak,  throw  the  ball  in  for  the  debate  by  telling 
you  something  about  the  country  and  the  people. 

The  country  of  Egypt  is,  you  may  say,  just  the  Nile  and  the  Suez  Canal. 
The  Nile  is  a  river  that  comes  from  Uganda,  as  you  will  see  from  your 
maps,*  Uganda  being  a  British  Protectorate  which  uses  the/  water  of  the 
Nile.  It  runs  through  the  Sudan  into  Egypt  and  at  Cairo  breaks  into 
several  channels,  forming  the  Delta  of  the  Nile,  one  of  the  most  valuable 
agricultural  districts  in  the  world.  Without  the  Nile,  Egypt  would  not 
exist.  Her  people,  generally  speaking  (about  ninety  per  cent  of  them) 
ate  fellahin — peasantry  living  on  the  waters  of  the  Nile— clinging  to  its 
banks,  busy  all  day  in  the  fields,  and  they  have  been  living  so  for  genera¬ 
tions  back. 

The  rest  (perhaps  ten  per  cent)  of  the  people  are  very  largely  the  Turks 
and  those  who  came  in  with  the  Turks  in  the  time  of  Mehemet  Ali,  and  a 
great  number  of  Europeans  who  have  been  attracted  to  that  country  and 
have  engaged  in  commerce  of  various  types,  great  and  small,  and  also  some 
professional  men,  and  in  the  wake  of  those  Europeans  came  a  great 
many  Levantine  rapscallions  of  all  sorts  trying  to  get  a  living,  not  always 
honestly. 

Now,  those  ninety  per  cent  of  the  people  of  Egypt  that  we  spoke  about, 
the  fellahin,  are  illiterate.  They  go  out  to  the  fields  in  the  morning  and  they 
come  back  in  the  evening,  and  it  is  very  important  to  remember  that  when 
you  are  considering  a  political  problem,  because  the  minds  of  people  of 


•See  map  on  page  31. 


5 


that  sort  are  very  different  from  the  minds  of  literate  people  who  read  for 
themselves  and  think  for  themselves. 

The  Suez  Canal,  which  doesn’t  bother  Egypt  very  much,  is  of  the  great¬ 
est  importance  to  the  British  Empire.  It  is  a  link  in  her  communications 
which  is  so  important  that  she  cannot  permit  any  anarchy  or  any  serious 
disturbances  to  take  place  in  a  country  in  close  proximity  to  it.  So,  as  your 
Chairman  was  telling  you  just  now,  when  there  was  a  revolt  under  Arabi 
in  Egypt,  when  we  asked  France,  Italy  and  Turkey  to  join  us  in  putting 
down  that  revolt,  and  they  would  not  do  it,  we  had  to  do  it  ourselves,  and 
we  did  do  it,  and  that  was  what  started  us  in  the  occupation  of  Egypt  which 
has  been  going  on  until  now. 

Under  Lord  Cromer,  tbe  prosperity  of  the  country  grew  enormously. 
The  administrators  whom  he  put  in  were  almost  without  exception  success¬ 
ful  to  a  greater  or  lesser  degree,  and  out  of  bankruptcy  a  fine  and  pros¬ 
perous  country  has  been  made.  This  has  been  made  possible  only  by  the 
British  occupation. 

During  the  Great  War,  we  had  to  make  up  our  minds  that  the  political 
position  of  Egypt  had  to  be  clarified.  We  could  have  annexed  it  perhaps. 
We  could  have  done  that  many  times,  but  we  never  wanted  to;  it  wasn’t 
our  intention  and  it  wasn’t  our  policy  to  do  that.  We  srdd  that  we  would 
go  out  when  she  could  govern  herself,  and  that  is  what  we  adhere  to 
still. 

During  the  war,  as  I  say,  we  could  have  annexed  Egypt.  We  could  have 
said  to  Egypt — and  the  Egyptians  probably  would  have  done  it — “make 
some  act  of  aggression  as  against  Turkey,”  and  she  would  have  been 
committed  then  on  the  side  of  the  Allies;  but  we  thought  it  better — at  least 
for  the  purposes  of  the  war — to  declare  a  Protectorate.  When  we  did 
that,  we  told  the  people  of  Egypt  that  we  were  going  to  run  the  war  our¬ 
selves  and  we  weren’t  going  to  call  upon  them  for  any  help.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  they  helped  very  willingly  in  such  things  as  labor  corps,  camel  trans¬ 
port  corps,  and  many  other  auxiliary  services  which  were  very,  very  use¬ 
ful  ;  in  fact,  I  hardly  know  what  we  should  have  done  without  them  in 
Palestine. 

However,  while  that  was  going  on,  the  young  inspectors  that  we  have  in 
all  the  provinces  of  Egypt  came  and  said,  “We  want  to  go  and  join  a 
regiment.  We  don’t  want  to  stay  here.”  When  young  fellows  insist  like 
that,  unfortunately  people  give  in,  and  those  young  men  who  used  to  be  tbe 
great  friends  of  tbe  fellahin  were  allowed  to  go  and  join  regular  regiments, 
and  the  result  was  that  the  fellahin.  or  peasantry  of  Egypt,  were  left  at 
the  tender  mercies  of  sheiks  and  omdehs  in  the  villages  who  brought  about 
the  same  sort  of  regime  that  used  to  be  there  before  we  went  into  the 
country.  That  is  to  say,  that  when  the  sheik  or  omdeh  wanted  to  do  any¬ 
thing  or  was  told  to  do  anything,  he  did  it  harshly  and  then  he  said,  “It 
is  the  British  who  told  me  to  do  it.” 

The  Nationalist  Party,  which  had  been  strong  and  growing  stronger, 
took  full  advantage  of  the  war,  and  when  they  saw  this  sort  of  thing  going 
on,  one  can  imagine  how  easy  it  was  for  them  to  get  hold  of  these  simple 
fellahin,  tell  them  what  brutes  these  British  were  who  were  allowing  all 
this  to  go  on,  and  so  work  on  the  feelings  of  these  illiterate  peasants  that 
they  joined,  in  a  sort  of  way,  the  Nationalist  Party.  It  was,  of  course, 
most  unfortunate  that  we  ever  took  those  young  inspectors  away. 

6 


I  must  admit  there  were  many  ways  in  which  the  British  could  have 
improved  the  conduct  of  the  war,  so  far  as  the  Egyptians  were  concerned, 
had  they  thought  of  it;  but  in  the  war,  if  you  will  look  back,  there  were 
so  many  considerations  that  were  purely  military  that  some  of  the  civil 
considerations  got  rather  overlooked,  and  so  the  Nationalist  Party  found 
a  very  easy  held  on  which  to  work  among  the  more  ignorant  of  the  Egyp¬ 
tians.  They  took  full  advantage  of  it. 

Among  the  more  enlightened  Egyptians  one  might  think  that  they  might 
have  had  more  difficulty,  but  it  is  the  nature  of  the  Egyptian,  I  think,  to 
intrigue.  Politics,  especially  politics  in  a  coffee-house,  he  loves,  and  that 
is  the  place  where  this  party  has  very  largely  grown  in  numbers  anyhow, 
if  not  in  weight.  We,  in  our  system  of  education,  taught  to  become  young 
government  officials  dozens  of  times  more  men  than  there  were  ever  likely 
to  be  places  for  them  to  go  into,  so  that  there  were  certain  Egyptians  of  the 
middle  class  who  had  a  smattering  of  education — the  sort  of  education 
that  made  it  possible  for  him  to  read  and  understand  any  newspapers  that 
might  be  about  and  to  talk  with  some  fluency  about  it  all  in  the  coffee¬ 
houses  ;  and  when  those  young  men  saw  that  there  was  no  place  for  them 
and  that  a  great  many  of  the  places  were  filled  by  the  British,  they  very 
naturally  said,  “I  am  just  as  good  as  that  fellow;  why  shouldn’t  I  have 
that  job?  What  is  the  good  of  the  British  staying  here  any  longer?  Let 
us  run  the  country  ourselves.”  That  is  easily  understood. 

At  the  end  of  the  war,  that  being  the  situation  in  Egypt,  there  was  a 
great  alarm  in  the  Mohammedan  world  as  to  what  was  going  to  happen 
about  the  Caliphate,  that  is  to  say,  the  head  of  the  Mohammedan  com¬ 
munity,  seeing  that  Turkey  had  been  beaten  in  the  war. 

This  was  taken  up  with  a  good  deal  of  eagerness  in  Cairo  generally  and 
in  particular  at  their  Mohammedan  University,  el-Azhar.  It  was  a  flame 
which  grew  and  spread  broadcast  over  Egypt  just  after  the  war.  This 
made  a  situation  of  such  unrest  in  Egypt,  all  those  things  combined,  that 
you  can  imagine  what  they  felt  when  there  fell  among  all  the  tired  peoples 
of  the  world  that  blessed  word  “self-determination.”  They  said,  “Here 
is  the  very  thing,”  and  they  asked  for  their  delegates  to  be  received  at  the 
Conference  at  Paris  and  in  London.  Then  (I  think,  very  unwisely)  we 
not  only  didn’t  assist  them  there,  but  we  said  they  couldn’t  go,  or  be  heard 
if  they  did  go. 

Well,  now,  when  they  got  back  to  Egypt  there  was  another  trouble, 
there  was  another  fire,  and  I  think  that  is  really  largely  responsible  for 
the  present  state  of  affairs.  So  we  sent  a  commission  under  Lord  Milner, 
and  the  members  of  that  commission  were  men  of  the  greatest  experience, 
and  the  class  of  men  of  character  and  temperament  who  would  get  on  with 
— and  most  of  them  did  know  well — the  leading  Egyptians.  It  took  them 
a  long  time  before  they  could  get  the  statesmen  of  Egypt  to  come  and  talk 
to  them,  but  eventually  they  did.  The  result  of  their  inquiry  was  to 
advise  the  British  Government  to  give  independence  to  Egypt  with  cer¬ 
tain  reservations,  and  those  reservations  were  that  the  question  of  the 
Canal  and  the  Sudan  were  things  that  we  reserved  to  ourselves  for  dis¬ 
cussion  with  Egypt,  and  that  as  far  as  defending  Egypt  against  any  foreign 
aggression  from  outside,  we  would  look  to  that,  and  that  as  far  as  looking 
after  the  interests  and  the  properties  and  the  lives  of  nationals  of  foreign 
countries  in  Egypt,  we  would  look  after  that,  too.  So  when  that  Treaty  of 

7 


Independence  was  made,  it  was  part  and  parcel  of  the  Treaty  that  those 
matters  should  be  discussed  as  soon  as  possible  between  Great  Britain  and 
Egypt,  and  that  decisions  should  be  come  to  on  those  four  questions  in  a 
spirit  of  mutual  accommodation. 

Great  Britain  was  ready  to  meet  and  treat  with  the  Egyptian  representa¬ 
tives  at  any  time  they  desired,  but  Egypt  has  not  seen  fit  to  come  forward 
and  discuss  the  matter.  Tentatively  she  has  sent  one  or  two  men  who 
have  always  said,  “We  have  got  to  have  the  Sudan.  You  mustn’t  stay  in  the 
country.  We  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  your  control  of  the  Canal.” 

In  fact,  they  want  entire  independence  without  any  of  those  reservations, 
and  we  said  that  without  those  reservations  the  treaty  wouldn’t  stand.  At 
the  same  time  that  we  did  that,  we  told  all  the  powers  of  the  world 
that  we  considered  our  relations  with  Egypt  a  domestic  question  and  that, 
in  fact,  we  should  resent  any  interference  from  any  other  power,  and 
that  was  perfectly  clearly  stated  at  the  time.  But  the  Egyptians  thought  that 
if  they  hammered  on,  they  would  get  their  independence  and  they  would 
be  able  to  snap  tbeir  fingers  at  these  four  reservations.  They  thought  if  they 
could  keep  on  agitating  long  enough  they  would  win,  and  so  the  agitation 
has  been  growing.  This  Nationalist  Party  has  been  led  by  a  few  very  ex¬ 
treme  Nationalists,  who  were  stronger  than  the  rest  and  more  obtrusive, 
and  they  have  worked  up  the  rest  of  their  party.  They  have  ramifications 
all  over  Egypt  and  in  the  Sudan,  and  their  one  ambition  is  to  make  every¬ 
thing  difficult  for  Great  Britain,  and  they  will  stop  at  nothing. 

The  other  day,  you  will  remember,  they  assassinated  General  Stack, 
the  Governor-General  of  the  Sudan — just  a  cold-blooded  murder  in  the 
street.  There  is  a  position  of  the  greatest  gravity.  I  knew  him  well. 
He  was  a  great  friend  of  mine  for  thirty  years.  He  was  a  man  of  the 
most  charming  character ;  never  did  anybody  any  harm ;  the  most  lovable 
of  men.  He  never  had  an  enemy  there,  I  am  perfectly  sure,  so  it  is  not 
he,  but  just  the  office;  it  is  just  Great  Britain  that  they  are  aiming  at,  and 
that  is  the  situation,  and  that  is  the  moment  that  they  choose  to  appeal  to 
the  League  of  Nations. 

Now,  suppose  the  Philippine  situation  were  a  little  more  analagous  than 
it  is — it  is  fairly  so — suppose  that,  and  suppose  there  was  a  Panama  Canal 
question  mixed  up  with  that  at  the  same  time,  and  suppose,  we  will  say, 
General  Leonard  Wood  were  assassinated  by  the  Filipinos,  would  that  be 
a  moment  to  treat  of  that  question  with  the  League  of  Nations?  No,  of 
course  it  wouldn’t  be. 

Luckily  we  have  got  a  man  there;  we  have  got  Lord  Allenby,  and  he 
dealt  with  that  situation  quite  firmly,  but  by  no  means  harshly,  and  so  long 
as  he  is  there,  I  have  great  hopes  that  things  will  straighten  out.  Much 
more  danger  is  likely  to  come  from  men  far  cleverer  than  Lord  Allenby, 
perhaps,  but  who  are  at  a  distance  and  don’t  see  things  so  clearly  as  he 
does,  and  perhaps  haven’t  got  the  same  high  character  and  frankness  and 
clearness  of  outlook  that  he  has. 

Now,  the  Sudan  is  absolutely  a  different  question.  Just  lately  it  bas  be¬ 
come  badly  mixed  up  in  the  Egyptian  matter,  but  it  is  an  absolutely  dis¬ 
tinct  question.  We  heard  that  Egypt  used  to  govern  the  Sudan.  She  prac¬ 
tically  never  has  governed  it.  For  any  sort  of  government  you  have  to  go 
and  look  back  to  some  indistinct  history  of  the  Pharaohs.  When  Mehemet 
Ali  sent  people  there,  it  was  no  good  government,  no  administration,  so 

8 


the  country  became  a  hopeless,  corrupt,  slave-trading,  black  spot  of  Africa, 
and  we  had  to  get  them  out.  If  they  go  there  again,  alone,  somebody  will 
have  to  get  them  out  again.  I  don’t  believe  for  a  moment  that  the  Arabs 
or  the  Sudanese  will  admit  of  Egypt’s  governing  it  alone.  Anyhow,  we 
don’t  mean  that  they  shall  try.  We  have  gone  there.  We  have  spent  per¬ 
haps  no  more  money  than  Egypt  has,  perhaps  no  mere  lives,  but  anyhow, 
we  have  }  roduced  the  administration  that  has  made  the  Sudan  prosperous. 
We  have  got  it  there,  and  it  is  for  the  good  of  the  Arabs  and  the  Sudanese 
that  it  shall  stay  there  until  they  can  govern  themselves. 

We  were  quite  right  to  make  a  condominium  with  Egypt  when  we  took 
the  Sudan  together  with  her,  and  as  far  as  she  can  come  and  take  her  hand 
in  that  government,  let  her  come,  but  while  she  sends  no  one  but  these 
young  students  into  the  small  offices  of  the  government  to  give  trouble,  to 
work  against  the  British,  then  she  had  better  stay  out.  Nobody  hears  any¬ 
thing  from  Egypt  about  self-determination  for  the  Sudan.  There  is  not  an 
Egyptian  native  in  it.  They  are  either  Arabs  or  Sudanese,  not  Egyptians. 
It  is  not  their  country. 

Well,  that  is  just  how  I  feel  about  it,  ladies  and  gentlemen.  (Applause.) 

I  don’t  for  a  moment  want  to  queer  the  pitch  for  anybody,  but  I  just 
want  to  tell  you  frankly  what  my  feeling  is,  and  I  am  sure  it  is  like  that 
of  all  other  Englishmen  and  a  great  many  other  Europeans  who  have  lived 
some  time  in  Egypt ;  they  would  agree  with  me  almost  throughout.  It  isn’t 
just  my  opinion.  It  is  the  opinion  of  most  of  the  people  like  me,  and  all 
I  would  say  to  you  is  not  to  listen  to  those,  of  whom  there  are  a  great  many, 
who  will  go  around  government  waste  paper  baskets  or  go  around  listening 
to  the  small  politics  of  the  coffee-houses;  don’t  listen  to  that.  Try  to  get 
the  picture  in  your  mind  firmly  yourself,  until  you  feel  yourself  forced 
to  certain  conclusions  and  I  believe  they  will  be  mine.  (Applause.) 

The  Chairman:  I  think  we  are  all  debtors  to  General  Hoskins  for 
the  frankness  and  directness  with  which  he  has  put  what  he  probably  rightly 
calls  a  typical  British  point  of  view. 

Now,  the  next  speaker  is  an  old  friend  of  ours.  You  all  know  Dr. 
Gibbons.  You  all  know  about  his  books,  some  of  which  I  would  recommend 
to  you ;  one  of  which  I  would  distinctly  not  recommend  to  you.  It  isn’t  his 
book  on  Africa.  It  is  another  book  in  which  he  discusses  American  policies. 
He  knows  much  more,  I  think  personally,  about  Europe  than  he  does  about 
what  American  foreign  policy  should  be.  (Laughter.)  We  usually  pre¬ 
fer  to  have  him  speak  on  these  things  about  which  he  knows  most. 

Now,  it  happens  that  Egypt  is  one  of  these.  He  has  been  in  the  Near 
East,  as  you  know,  a  great  deal.  He  has  been  closely  associated  with  many 
people  in  Egypt.  He  was,  I  know,  a  personal  friend  of  the  assassinated 
British  Governor-General,  and  he  has  been  personally  associated  closely 
with  many  of  the  Egyptian  Nationalists.  So,  I  am  sure  we  look  forward 
with  keen  interest  to  see  how  much  he  will  tell  us  of  what  he  thinks  in  his 
twenty-five  minutes.  (Applause.) 

DR.  HERBERT  ADAMS  GIBBONS 

MR.  CHAIRMAN,  ladies  and  gentlemen:  I  was  fascinated  by 
the  talk  that  General  Hoskins  has  just  given.  It  is,  as  our  Chairman 
has  rightly  said,  and  as  the  general  himself  has  claimed,  the  point  of  view 
not  only  of  himself,  but  also  of  many  men,  perhaps  of  most  of  those  who 

9 


have  given  their  lives  to  building  up  British  power  in  Africa.  It  is  the 
point  of  view  of  most  of  the  foreign  residents,  I  know,  who  are  at  the 
present  time  and  who  have  been  for  many  years  in  Egypt.  These  men 
have  not  been  to  the  coffee-houses.  They  have  never  sat  down  at  table 
with  the  natives  and  have  never  heard  or  listened  sympathetically  to  their 
point  of  view. 

In  my  work  in  the  Near  East,  I  have  always  endeavored  (not  always  with 
success,  I  will  confess)  to  maintain  the  objective  point  of  view.  I  have  tried 
to  look  at  these  different  great  questions  in  their  bearing  upon  world  con¬ 
ditions.  I  have  been  in  dissent  from  the  point  of  view  in  regard  to  our 
entry  into  the  League  of  Nations,  so  dear  to  the  heart  of  our  Chairman  and 
to  a  great  many  of  the  members  of  the  Foreign  Policy  Association. 

Perhaps  I  have  been  too  objective  in  what  I  have  set  forth  as  to  American 
policies  in  the  past  and  in  the  present,  and  my  prophecies  have  been  too 
realistic,  I  presume,  concerning  the  trend  that  those  policies  are  likely  to 
take  in  the  future. 

In  the  Egyptian  question  I  feel  that  our  speaker  who  has  just  finished 
has  made  a  fair  presentation  of  what  we  have  come  to  call  in  the  last  ten 
years  the  “Uebermensch,”  the  superman,  theory.  It  is  the  point  of  view 
generally  adopted  by  the  white  race  in  connection  with  Africans  and 
Asiatics.  It  is  the  point  of  view  particularly  of  the  English-speaking 
peoples,  and  among  the  English-speaking  peoples  of  a  certain  group  that 
we  find  in  high  places  in  Great  Britain  and  in  the  former  German  Empire. 

In  the  year  1914  I  heard  Herr  von  Mach,  who  had  been  for  a  long  time 
the  administrator  of  the  Polish  districts  of  Prussia  (it  was  he  who  had 
attempted  that  famous,  or  infamous,  or  nefarious  colonization  project),  talk 
about  the  Poles  and  their  capacity  for  self-government.  He  gave  a  brief 
sketch  of  the  history  of  Poland.  Let  me  say  that  his  presentation  of  the 
situation  in  regard  to  Poland  was  almost  word  for  word  and  paragraph  for 
paragraph  the  presentation  that  we  have  heard  of  the  situation  of  the  Egyp¬ 
tians,  and  it  might  hold,  I  fear,  as  General  Hoskins’  views  regarding  any 
people  of  Asia  or  Africa. 

We  go  over  these  points  one  by  one.  Of  course,  first  of  all,  that  ninety 
per  cent  of  the  people  are  illiterate;  second,  that  the  protecting  power 
which  comes  in  to  dominate  has  given  them  great  material  blessings ;  and 
third,  that  they  are  not  in  a  position  to  goven  themselves,  but  when  they 
are,  of  course,  they  will  have  all  the  rights  of  self-government  given  to 
them. 

I  heard  virtually  the  same  kind  of  an  interpretation  of  the  situation  in 
Eastern  Europe  at  Christmas-time  in  the  year  1914,  the  first  year  of  the 
war,  sitting  in  the  Ball  Platz  in  Vienna  and  talking  to  the  famous  Minister 
of  Foreign  Affairs  of  Austro-Hungary,  who  wrote  the  ultimatum  to  Ser¬ 
bia.  He  went  back  into  the  past  history  of  the  Serbians.  He  asked  me  if  I 
was  aware  of  the  fact  that  more  than  ninety  per  cent  of  these  people  were 
ignorant  peasants  who  couldn’t  read  or  write,  that  a  little  coterie  of  poli¬ 
ticians  had  taken  them  in  hand,  that  they  had  been  attempting  to  break  up 
the  Austro-Hungarian  Empire.  He  dilated  upon  the  virtues,  of  course,  of 
the  Archduke  and  of  his  wife  and  the  horror  of  the  assassination  that  had 
taken  place  in  Bosnia.  He  spoke  of  the  ineradicable  differences  that  sepa¬ 
rated  the  various  Serbian  peoples.  He  maintained  that  from  Vienna  they 
could  be  ruled  far  better  than  they  ever  could  be  ruled  from  Belgrade. 

10 


He  predicted  what  has  happened,  the  arising  of  the  peasant  party  under 
Radich  and  the  confusion  that  would  result,  and  he  said,  “Is  the  world 
going  to  be  plunged  into  a  war,  swept  away  by  cheap  sentimentality  or  ideal¬ 
ism  on  this  false  doctrine  of  self-determination?”  and  then  he  went  and 
pulled  out  of  a  pigeon-hole  a  series  of  papers  in  which  he  showed  me  the 
tremendous  benefits  that  had  come  to  Bosnia  and  Herzegovina  in  over 
thirty  years  of  the  rule  of  the  Austrians. 

They  had  built  railways  there.  They  had  increased  the  deposits  in  the 
savings  banks  exactly  as  the  Germans  had  increased  by  500  per  cent  in  a 
certain  length  of  time  the  deposits  in  Posnania  and  also  in  Alsace-Lorraine; 
and  his  argument  was  that  these  people  had  material  blessings  that  were 
bestowed  upon  them  from  the  fact  that  they  were  being  ruled  by  a  superior 
race,  and,  therefore,  why  should  they  worry?  And  he  was  very,  very 
sorry  over  the  fact  that  this  great  crisis  in  world  history  had  arisen 
through  the  coffee-house  agitation  of  certain  “obtrusive”  (I  use  the  Gen¬ 
eral’s  adjective) — obtrusive  politicians  whom  we  have  known  here  in  this 
country  and  whom  we  have  honored  in  the  course  of  the  past  fifteen  years 
as  heroes — Pasitch,  Benes,  Masaryk — you  know  who  I  mean! 

I  want  to  say  right  here  in  the  beginning,  in  reference  to  this  Egyptian 
situation,  that  I  am  on  record  in  my  books  in  full  praise  of  the  British 
Administration  in  Egypt  and  in  the  Sudan  and  of  the  type  of  men  who 
have  been  responsible  for  the  great  material  blessings  that  have  come 
to  Egypt  and  the  Sudan  in  the  course  of  the  British  occupation.  I  think 
from  our  Western,  Occidental  point  of  view,  it  has  been  a  blessing  to  the 
Egyptians  and  the  Sudanese  alike  to  have  had  this  long  period  of  British 
rule.  I  believe  that  the  men  who  have  been  responsible  for  the  govern¬ 
ment  there,  men  like  our  speaker  today,  have  sincerely  invested  their  lives 
in  what  was,  from  their  point  of  view,  a  very  great  work  for  world  civiliza¬ 
tion  and  something  that  would  help  and  strengthen  also  the  British  Empire 
as  an  agency  for  civilization.  And  so  there  is  nothing  at  all  that  is  un¬ 
friendly  in  what  I  have  to  say  today  concerning  the  British  in  Egypt.  I 
have  broken  bread  with  them,  in  Egypt  and  in  the  Sudan.  Many  of  these 
men  are  my  personal  friends.  What  I  am  saying  today  is  something  that 
has  a  significance  which  is  far  beyond  the  acts  of  any  one  people  like  the 
British  whom  we  love  so  dearly,  or  any  set  of  administrators  such  as  those 
who  have  so  wisely  and  beneficently  ruled  over  Egypt  and  the  Sudan,  and 
who  have  given  a  great  measure  of  prosperity  to  those  countries. 

In  the  course  of  the  last  fifteen  years  there  have  come  into  the  world 
new  influences.  There  has  come  into  the  world  a  great  yearning  for  world 
peace.  The  League  of  Nations,  the  World  Court  and  all  these  various 
manifestations  like  the  Geneva  Protocol  are  proofs  of  our  desire  to  at¬ 
tain  a  world-wide  status  quo  that  will  make  us  in  the  future  not  so  much 
fighting  people  as  we  have  been  in  the  past. 

I  firmly  believe  that  the  only  way  we  can  do  this  is  to  live  and  let  live 
and  to  consider  that  other  peoples,  no  matter  how  illiterate  they  may  be 
and  no  matter  how  separated  they  may  be  from  us  in  civilization  and  in 
religion,  are  only  different  from  us;  because  they  are  different  from  us, 
they  are  not  necessarily  inferior  to  us.  (Applause.) 

I  believe  also  that  we  have  to  realize,  in  connection  with  all  the  Asiatic 
and  African  peoples,  that  they  must  have  a  full  opportunity,  no  matter  how 

11 


badly  they  may  fare  themselves  as  a  result  of  having  had  that  opportunity, 
to  work  out  their  own  salvation  toward  self-government. 

If  men  like  General  Hoskins  have  been  able  to  accomplish  so  much  in 
Egypt  and  the  Sudan,  it  is  because  they  have  behind  them,  as  we  in  America 
have,  hundreds  of  years  of  political  and  social  evolution.  There  was  a  time 
when  we  were  ninety  per  cent  illiterate  or  more  than  that.  There  was  a 
time  when  we  were  fighting  against  one  another  in  Wessex,  and  Sussex,  and 
Essex.  There  was  a  time  when  Scotland  and  England  were  going  through 
centuries  of  border  raids.  Out  of  all  that  confusion,  out  of  all  that 
anarchy,  through  that  period  of  testing  that  extended  over  hundreds  of 
years,  came  the  ability  to  become  self-governing  peoples. 

I  think  that  it  is  not  fair  or  just  for  us  to  be  the  ones  to  gauge  the 
arrival  of  the  time  for  Oriental  peoples  to  be  fit  for  self-government,  they 
having  had  none  of  the  opportunity  that  we  have  had  of  evolution.  How 
can  they  by  some  magic  have  arrived  suddenly  at  a  time  when  they  can 
create  an  atmosphere  and  the  machinery  of  an  Occidental  civilization  such 
as  we  would  approve  of  in  their  country,  presto !  with  never  a  period  of 
experimenting,  of  testing,  of  making  mistakes  and  learning  to  correct 
them — as  we  had? 

I  have  a  son,  and  I  know  that  I  have  been  through  certain  experiences 
in  my  life  that  would  be  very  helpful  for  him  if  he  would  follow  me  and 
allow  me  to  direct  him  and  guide  him.  I  have  been  through  the  adolescent 
period  and  storm.  I  have  been  through  the  experiences  that  a  man  has 
at  college.  I  have  had  difficulties  of  adjustment,  even  with  the  best  of 
women,  in  the  earliest  years  of  my  married  life.  I  once  made  a  perfect 
hash  of  my  financial  affairs,  as  almost  every  other  young  man  has  done. 
I  wasted  years  of  my  life  in  going  from  pillar  to  post  and  not  accom¬ 
plishing  much,  and  how  much  I  would  have  been  saved  if  I  had  only 
taken  the  guidance  of  my  wise  father  during  that  period ! 

Of  course,  when  my  son  goes  out  from  the  home,  I  could  adopt  the 
argument  that  is  adopted  in  regard  to  Egypt  and  all  these  peoples,  and  I 
could  say,  “Now,  my  boy,  I  have  experience.”  (I  wouldn’t  tell  him  how  I 
had  gained  it.  I  would  not  take  that  into  consideration.)  “I  know  better 
what  is  good  for  you  than  you  know  for  yourself.  I  can  run  your  financial 
affairs.  I  can  run  the  affairs  of  your  heart  with  the  various  girls  that 
are  going  to  make  assaults  upon  you  better  than  you  can  do  yourself.  I 
can  start  you  in  business.  I  can  give  you  all  kinds  of  advice  whether 
you  go  into  business  or  a  profession.  Look  at  me,  with  my  white  hair, 
approaching  the  age,  pretty  soon,  of  fifty,  with  all  of  these  years  of  ex¬ 
periences  I  have  had  behind  me.  You  follow  me!” 

I  would  maintain  (and  this  is  the  argument  and  analogy  I  want  to  make 
in  regard  to  all  these  peoples,  Egyptians  and  others)  that  that  boy,  if  I 
lived  to  be  seventy-five  and  he  attained  the  age  of  fifty,  when  he  arrived 
at  fifty,  under  such  a  tutelage,  wouldn’t  be  worth  a  tinker’s  dam.  He  would 
be  worth  no  more  than  when  he  was  twenty. 

In  regard  to  this  whole  Egyptian  question,  when  it  comes  to  this  matter 
of  self-government,  the  right  of  self-determination,  I  believe  that  the  Egyp¬ 
tians,  if  left  to  themselves — and  they  are  going  to  be  left  to  themselves — 
are  going  to  make  a  hash  of  affairs  for  a  long  period  of  time.  The  Egyp¬ 
tians  are  not  supermen,  as  we  think  we  ourselves  are.  But  perhaps  they 
can  become  as  we  are,  if  they  go  through  the  same  period  of  experimenting 

12 


and  have  the  same  chance  that  we  did  of  working  out  their  own  salvation — > 
and  I  think  that  of  every  nation  upon  the  face  of  the  earth.  Has  not  God 
given  us  all  immortal  souls  and  has  He  not  endowed  others  with  faculties 
and  qualities  like  unto  those  that  we  have?  Their  handicap  is  not  in  an 
essential  inferiority  to  us,  but  only  in  that  they  have  not  had  behind  them 
the  same  period  of  training  and  opportunity  as  European  peoples. 

Having  disposed  of  that  point,  I  will  speak  secondly  of  the  question  of 
material  blessing  in  Egypt.  I  do  not  believe  that  any  one  else  can  bestow 
upon  other  people  material  blessings  and  guide  them  in  those  material  bless¬ 
ings  and  give  them  gifts  and  create  among  them  a  feeling  and  spirit  of 
happiness  and  well-being.  No  father  was  able  to  do  that  with  his  own 
children.  He  couldn’t  simply  hand  them  out  things.  He  couldn’t  say, 
“Now  look  here;  let  me  run  things  and  you  are  going  to  be  better  off,” 
and  expect  to  have  those  children  of  his  leading  happy  lives.  People  have 
pride.  What  we  Occidentals  don’t  realize  about  the  Orientals  is  that  they 
are  just  as  proud  as  we  are,  perhaps  even  prouder.  They  have  got  to 
have  a  chance  to  run  things  themselves,  and  above  all,  they  have  that  in¬ 
herent  right. 

That  brings  us  to  the  point  as  to  whether  in  this  question  of  Egypt,  and 
the  question  of  all  these  Oriental  nations,  we  are  going  to  continue  to  have 
two  moralities — one  morality  for  Europe  and  America,  and  another  moral¬ 
ity  for  Africa  and  for  Asia.  This  is  one  of  those  significant  questions 
where  we  have  to  make  the  choice. 

Now  I  want  to  go  back  a  little  bit  into  the  question  of  Egypt  and  to 
develop  it  from  another  point  of  view,  filling  in  some  of  the  points  that 
have  been  left  out  in  the  two  previous  sketches  of  the  situation  that  has 
developed  in  Egypt.  When  the  British  went  into  Egypt,  they  declared 
that  they  were  only  going  in  there  temporarily.  The  situation  ever  since 
that  “temporary”  entrance  into  Egypt  reminds  me  of  a  friend  of  mine 
whom  I  knew  in  Paris  back  in  student  days.  He  was  an  artist,  and  after 
a  great  many  years  his  father  got  tired  of  having  him  a  remittance  man 
and  wanted  him  to  come  home  and  show  him  some  of  the  pictures  he  had 
painted.  When  we  heard  about  his  leaving,  as  is  always  the  case  over 
there,  there  were  certain  obligations  and  debts  that  hadn’t  been  acquitted 
one  with  another  in  the  Quarter,  and  one  of  my  friends  went  to  Bob  and 
said,  “Bob,  look  here!  I  hate  to  speak  to  you  about  it”  (he  was  very 
much  embarrassed — why  is  it  we  are  always  so  embarrassed  when  we  ask 
people  to  return  the  money  we  have  loaned  them?)  “I  wish  you  would 
return  to  me  before  you  go  home  that  little  sum,  don’t  you  know.” 

Bob  was  very  much  impressed  with  the  fact  that  his  friend  was  em¬ 
barrassed,  and  he  put  his  hand  on  his  shoulder  to  reassure  him  and  said, 
“Look  here,  old  man,  don’t  you  worry  about  that.  Whenever  you  feel  like 
asking  me  for  that  money,  you  go  ahead  and  do  it.”  (Laughter.) 

It  has  been  like  that  with  British  statesmen  ever  since  their  first  entry 
into  Egypt.  They  made  definite  pledges  not  only  to  the  Egyptian  people 
but  to  other  nations  that  their  entry  into  Egypt  (a  country  that  was  not 
a  domestic  concern  of  the  British  Empire  alone  but  which  is  something 
that  affects  the  whole  world’s  prosperity  and  well-being)  was  only  for  a 
brief  period  and  they  were  going  to  get  out.  Gladstone  said  very,  very 
clearly,  time  and  again  (you  can  see  it  in  the  Hansard  reports  of  Parlia¬ 
mentary  debates)  that  it  would  be  a  shame  and  a  disgrace  if  Great  Britain 

13 


were  to  go  back  on  her  word  and  remain  indefinitely  in  Egypt.  Over  and 
over  again  that  has  been  said.  Yet  during  that  time,  because  of  Egypt’s 
growing  importance  in  the  British  Empire,  it  seemed  a  wise  thing  to  con¬ 
tinue  to  stay  in  Egypt  and  go  back  to  the  reconquest  of  the  Sudan  and  to 
the  organization  of  those  territories.  It  is  the  old  policy  of  imperialism 
that  has  been  followed  by  so  many  nations,  and  excuses  were  found 
always  that,  “Well,  we  will  get  out  when  they  arrive  at  the  period  of 
self-government.” 

The  General  has  said  to  us  this  afternoon  that  Great  Britain  is  perfectly 
willing  to  leave  when  the  Egyptians  arrive  at  that  point — which,  of  course, 
is  never,  never,  never  as  long  as  conditions  remain  as  they  are  now,  or  as 
they  have  been  ever  since  the  British  went  into  the  occupation  of  Egypt. 
It  is  a  challenge  to  the  British  today,  after  having  been  in  Egypt  over 
forty  years,  for  one  of  the  British  administrators  in  that  country  to  get 
up  and  tell  us  that  ninety  per  cent  of  the  people  are  illiterate.  (Applause.) 

I  hold  no  brief  for  ourselves  in  the  Philippines.  I  will  just  relieve  the 
General’s  mind  at  this  time,  and  say  that  I  think  we  ought  to  get  out  of 
the  Philippines.  I  am  in  favor  of  that.  I  am  asking  no  other  nation  to 
drink  a  dose  of  medicine  that  I  am  not  willing  for  my  own  nation  to  drink, 
and  I  think  that  the  applications  of  these  principles  should  be  an  applica¬ 
tion  that  is  world-wide. 

In  connection  with  Egypt,  then,  the  British  were  planning  not  to  get 
out  of  Egypt,  and  the  proof  of  it  is  to  be  found  in  the  Anglo-French 
agreement  of  1904,  which,  when  its  terms  became  known,  was  the  very 
beginning  of  the  Egyptian  nationalist  movement.  One  of  the  principal 
points  of  the  agreement  of  1904  was  that  France  was  to  have  a  free  hand 
in  Morocco  if  she  would  call  off  her  dogs  that  were  barking  at  the  British 
in  Egypt  and  allow  the  British  to  have  a  free  hand  there.  It  is  written 
right  in  the  text  of  that  agreement,  and  it  really  is  one  of  the  things  at 
the  heart  of  that  agreement  and  that  prompted  it.  There  was  no  intention 
in  1904,  and  there  has  been  no  intention  since,  on  tbe  part  of  the  British, 
of  ever  getting  out  of  Egypt.  They  wanted  to  stay  there  if  they  could. 

Now  during  the  period  between  1904  and  1914,  the  situation  in  Egypt  was 
like  the  situation  in  other  countries  subject  to  alien  rule.  There  was  the 
rise  of  a  nationalist  movement.  Begin  to  educate  the  people,  tell  them 
about  the  barons  of  Runnymede  and  how  they  forced  the  hand  of  their 
sovereign.  Tell  them  about  Joan  of  Arc  and  how  she  rid  her  country  of 
the  foreigners.  Tell  them  about  Hampden  and  the  Stamp  Act.  Tell  them 
about  George  Washington  and  the  period  at  Valley  Forge.  Tell  them 
about  the  men  of  the  French  revolution  that  fought  the  battle  of  Jemappes. 
Tell  them  about  the  Italian  Risorgimento  movement— any  history  that  we 
study.  How  have  we  become  great  and  strong — we  Anglo-Saxons,  we  of 
British  blood  and  American  blood?  How  have  the  French  become  a  great 
nation  ?  How  have  the  Italians  ?  Because  they  have  done  in  the  past  those 
things  that  we  tell  these  people  that  they  are  not  to  do  and  that  they  can¬ 
not  do;  and  if  they  attempt  to  follow  the  glorious  example  of  our  own 
forefathers,  we  will  call  them  obtrusive  politicians.  (Applause.) 

I  am  going  to  say  just  a  few  words  connected  with  the  events  which  have 
happened  since  1914.  In  1914  this  Protectorate  was  proclaimed  over 
Egypt,  a  unilateral  proclamation,  not  accepted  by  the  Egyptian  people.  The 
Egyptians  fought  by  the  side  of  the  British  during  the  World  War.  When 

14 


I  say  fought,  I  use  that  word  advisedly.  The  General  himself  has  given 
a  very  handsome  tribute  to  the  work  that  the  Egyptians  did  during  the 
World  War.  He  himself  has  said  that  he  didn’t  know  how  the  British 
would  have  gotten  along  in  Palestine  if  it  had  not  been  for  that  help  from 
Egypt.  In  1918,  at  the  end  of  the  World  War,  the  Egyptians  expected 
the  promises  to  be  kept;  and  all  the  sad  tragedies  and  troubles  that  have 
occurred  in  Egypt  since  the  end  of  the  World  War  have  been  due  to  the 
unsuccessful  attempt  of  the  British  government  to  establish  a  permanent 
Protectorate  over  Egypt.  This  was  written  into  the  Treaty  of  Versailles. 
The  delegates  of  Egypt  came  to  Paris.  They  were  not  given  a  hearing, 
because  of  official  British  opposition,  although  in  1915  I  attended  a  press 
luncheon  in  London  given  to  the  representatives  of  the  then  neutral  press 
at  which  Lord  Grey  (Sir  Edward  Grey,  as  he  was  at  that  time)  spoke. 

He  said,  “Tell  your  peoples  throughout  the  world  that  this  war  is  a 
great  moral  issue.  It  is  not  for  any  material  benefits  of  any  kind.  What 
we  want  and  the  one  thing  that  the  British  Empire  wants  alone,  that  which 
we  are  fighting  and  giving  our  sons  to  die  for,  is  that  every  people,  great 
and  small,  shall  have  the  right  and  the  privilege  to  work  out  its  own 
destinies  in  accordance  with  its  own  ideas  after  the  World  War  is  over.” 

He  didn’t  limit  his  pledge  merely  to  Europe.  He  was  thinking  also  of 
the  whole  world,  or  at  least  we  were  thinking  that,  we  who  heard  his 
words.  Was  Sir  Edward  indulging  in  hypocritical  cant  or  was  he  voicing 
an  ideal?  Did  he  mean  simply  to  give  the  right  of  self-determination  to 
peoples  wffio  were  subject  to  those  whom  we  were  fighting  in  the  war,  thus 
weakening  them,  or  was  it  the  proclamation  of  a  great  principle  that  was  to 
rule  the  world  in  the  future  ? 

Now  since  1918  the  policy  of  the  British  government  in  Egypt  has  been 
the  policy  of  “Schrecklichkeit,”  of  frightfulness,  of  intimidation,  of  re¬ 
pression,  in  the  eyes  of  the  Egyptian  people.  I  say  this  in  all  charity.  We 
Americans  have  adopted  this  policy,  too.  All  nations  that  have  imperial 
tendencies  have  adopted  it.  and  I  suppose  if  I  had  been  a  British  General  in 
Egypt  and  a  British  administrator  there,  common  sense  would  have  indi¬ 
cated  that  I  should  have  believed  in  and  adopted  such  a  policy  myself.  The 
question  is  not  what  you  do  after  you  get  into  the  galley,  but,  why  did  you 
go  into  the  galley?  And  there  they  were!  If  independence  was  granted, 
as  it  was,  it  was  not  the  result  of  the  recommendation  of  the  Milner  Com¬ 
mission,  which  had  been  ignored.  Two  years  after  the  Milner  Commission 
had  recommended  it,  the  continued  agitation  of  Zaghlul  Pasha  and  his 
partisans  made  the  British — forced  them  to — proclaim  the  Free  State. 

I  have  an  abhorrence  of  violence  of  any  kind  and  I  believe  that  the 
Egyptians  were  getting  into  a  very  dangerous  state.  I  thought  that  Zaghlul 
Pasha  (and  I  have  told  him  this  more  than  once)  had  gone  too  far,  espec¬ 
ially  in  the  last  year  and  a  half ;  but  viewing  the  circumstances  as  they  ex¬ 
isted  at  the  time,  there  never  would  have  been  any  Free  State  in  1922  in 
Ireland  or  in  Egypt  if  there  hadn’t  been  that  agitation  and  the  insistent 
determination  to  run  their  own  affairs  on  the  part  of  these  people.  It  is 
nonsense  to  speak  of  the  granting  of  independence  as  “the  gracious  pleasure 
of  His  Majesty.” 

The  present  situation  is  not  wholly  the  fault  of  the  British  government. 
I  believe  that  it  is  partially  the  fault  also  of  the  Egyptian  people.  The  fault 
is  shared  by  both  sides.  But  when  we  read  of  the  recent  events  in  Egypt 

15 


and  the  type  of  ultimatum,  with  the  demands  presented  to  the  Egyptian 
people,  in  view  of  the  fact  that  the  fault  was  shared  by  both  sides  in  the 
past,  a  mistaken  policy,  a  policy  of  blunders,  a  policy  that  was  short-sighted, 
a  policy  that  was  wholly  and  totally  against  the  recommendations  of  the 
Milner  Commission — in  view  of  the  fact  that  it  was  a  shared  responsibility 
(the  regrettable  assassination  of  this  man  who  was  my  friend  and  in  whose 
home  I  have  been  a  privileged  guest),  I  say  that  when  that  thing  occurred, 
for  the  British  government  to  write  an  ultimatum  that  smacked  so  much  of 
the  Austrian  ultimatum  of  1914  to  Serbia,  with  which  it  has  points  of 
striking  similarity,  then  I  think  that  the  time  has  come  when  public  opinion 
throughout  the  world  should  condemn  that  sort  of  a  thing  in  the  year  1924 
after  the  adoption  of  the  Geneva  protocol.  (Applause.) 

Now  in  conclusion  I  will  say  this :  the  amount  of  the  indemity  demanded 
was  excessive;  and  knowing  General  Stack  as  I  knew  him,  I  believe  that  if 
he  were  alive  today  to  speak  of  this  in  connection  with  the  assassination  of 
any  other  British  General  in  Egypt,  he  would  say  the  same  thing.  The 
demand  for  the  immediate  withdrawal  of  the  Egyptian  troops  from  the 
Sudan  without  any  international  treaty  or  agreement  either  between  Egypt 
and  Great  Britain,  or  between  the  two  parties  and  the  League,  was  taking 
advantage  of  a  situation  that  had  arisen  in  the  death  of  a  great  and  hon¬ 
ored  man  to  settle  the  question  for  ulterior  political  purposes  by  sweeping 
these  people  off  their  feet.  In  regard  to  the  irrigation  of  the  Nile,  of  the 
Gezira  region  in  the  Sudan,  the  demands  were  totally  unjustifiable  as  well 
as  irrelevant  to  the  issue. 

What  we  have  here  is  a  manifestation  of  the  old-fashioned  type  of  diplo¬ 
macy,  of  the  kind  that  the  World  War  and  all  the  new  morality  raised  by 
the  World  War  has  unqualifiedly  condemned  in  our  enemies,  and  there¬ 
fore  it  should  be  unqualifiedly  condemned  when  it  manifests  itself  in  our¬ 
selves  or  in  our  friends.  (Applause.) 

The  Chairman  :  Before  we  open  the  discussion  to  questions  and  ans¬ 
wers,  Sir  Willoughby  Dickinson  has  been  kind  enough  to  say  that  he  would 
open  the  discussion  for  us  briefly.  Sir  Willoughby,  as  most  of  you  know, 
was  a  former  delegate  from  Great  Britain  to  the  League  of  Nations  As¬ 
sembly,  and  Chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Minorities  of  the  League  of 
Nations  Union.  He  is  President,  I  think,  of  the  World  Alliance  for  Inter¬ 
national  Friendship  Through  the  Churches,  a  distinguished  British  Liberal, 
and  we  are  very  glad  to  have  him  open  the  discussion  and  give  us  another 
British  point  of  view. 

SIR  WILLOUGHBY  H.  DICKINSON 

A/f  R.  CHAIRMAN,  ladies  and  gentlemen :  It  is  a  great  pleasure  to 
address  this  remarkable  assembly,  for  two  reasons  especially.  First 
of  all,  because  one  has  been  led  to  believe  that  the  Americans  don’t  care 
about  anything  outside  America,  and,  nevertheless,  I  see  that  you  can 
gather  together  so  large  and  distinguished  an  assembly  to  discuss  a 
question  of  Egypt.  Indeed  I  may  add  that  since  I  have  been  in  this 
country  it  has  been  my  experience  that  I  find  all  through  your  popula¬ 
tion  an  intense  interest  in  the  affairs  of  the  rest  of  the  world. 

Secondly,  I  can’t  help  mentioning  that  I  think  some  little  bit  of 
responsibility  for  this  trouble  is  due  to  America.  (Applause.)  A  very 
distinguished  American  laid  down  in  very  noble  terms,  with  all  of  which 

16 


I  agree,  that  every  nation  should  have  the  right  of  self-determination 
over  its  own  form  of  government.  That  is  a  magnificent  theory,  but 
when  you  come  to  the  application  of  it,  it  is  a  little  more  difficult,  and 
I  only  wish  that  your  great  nation  were  helping  us  to  apply  that  principle 
in  many  parts  of  Europe  at  the  present  day.  (Applause.)  It  is  a  little 
legacy  you  have  left  to  us,  and  we  are  trying  to  apply  it  as  best  we  can. 
When  the  British  troops  were  marching  out  of  Dublin,  when  we  evacuated 
Ireland,  an  old  Irish  woman  waved  her  shawl  to  them,  and  she  said, 
“Goodbye,  me  darlin’s,  good  luck  to  you !  We  will  now  be  able  to  fight 
in  peace!”  (Laughter.) 

Now  that  is  very  much  what  is  happening  not  only  in  Ireland  and 
in  Egypt,  but  in  several  other  parts  of  Europe,  and  somebody  or  another 
will  suffer  for  it  unless  wise  action  is  taken  very  rapidly.  I  thought  to 
myself,  you  have  a  fine  object  lesson  of  the  problem  in  Egypt  in  the  two 
magnificent  speeches  we  have  just  listened  to.  We  had  the  speech  of  the 
experienced  administrator  in  Egypt,  which  I  am  sure  you  have  listened 
to  with  the  greatest  interest.  We  have  also  had  a  very  good  representative 
of  that  sort  of  feeling  with  which  we  all  sympathize,  but  which  we  all 
must  realize  the  difficulty  of  giving  effect  to ;  that  is  the  feeling  that  all 
men  are  equal  and  all  men  must  be  treated  exactly  in  the  same  way. 
(Applause.) 

Now  I  haven’t  time  to  meet  all  the  arguments  that  have  just  been 
raised,  but  I  think  in  one  or  two  things  Dr.  Gibbons  has  been  a  little 
bit  unfair.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Britain  has  always  desired  to  leave 
Egypt.  It  was  announced  by  Mr.  Gladstone  when  we  won  the  war 
there  and  conquered  the  Sudan.  It  was  announced  in  1887,  in  perfectly 
specific  words  by  Lord  Salisbury,  when  he  said,  “It  isn’t  open  to  us  to 
assume  the  Protectorate  of  Egypt  because  His  Majesty’s  government 
have  over  and  over  again  pledged  themselves  that  they  would  not  do  so.” 

And  now  we  have  since  1922 — I  am  quite  ready  to  admit  there  was 
a  considerable  amount  of  delay — definitely  made  this  announcement :  that 
the  British  Protectorate  over  Egypt  is  terminated  and  Egypt  is  declared 
to  be  an  independent  sovereign  state. 

It  is  quite  true  that  in  making  that  announcement  we  coupled  with  it 
certain  conditions  to  which  we  asked  the  sovereign  state  of  Egypt,  as 
she  will  be,  to  agree  to  certain  conditions  that  were  in  no  way  derogatory 
to  her  sovereignity  but  were  necessary  not  only  for  England  but  for 
the  rest  of  Egypt  and  also,  as  I  think,  for  the  rest  of  the  world.  That 
policy  has  now  been  reaffirmed  by  a  speech  which  I  read  the  other 
day  made  by  our  Prime  Minister,  in  which  he  said  the  British  government 
had  no  intention  of  going  back  upon  its  decision  of  1922. 

Now,  why  is  it  that  England  has  remained  so  long  in  Egypt?  People 
imagine  that  we  have  very  sinister  motives  in  doing  so.  I  dare  say  some 
people  have  made  money  there.  I  don’t  know  whether  they  have  or 
whether  they  haven’t,  but  I  can  assure  you  of  this :  the  only  reason  which 
has  kept  us  in  Egypt  has  been  the  profound  belief,  which  I  believe  is 
shared  by  almost  all  who  know  the  circumstances,  that  the  administration 
of  Britain  in  Egypt  has  resulted  in  good.  It  has  been  successful.  (Ap¬ 
plause.)  It  has  produced  peace  out  of  war;  order  out  of  chaos ;  prosperity 
from  the  most  abject  poverty;  and  it  has  not  been  harsh  to  the  population. 
Here  again  I  think  that  our  speaker  was  a  bit  unfair  to  General  Hoskins. 

17 


He  charged  the  British  nation  with  being  a  sort  of  superman,  always 
taking  the  position  that  we  are  superior  to  the  colored  races.  That  may 
be  true  with  a  large  number  of  Britishers.  It  is  true,  I  regret  to  say, 
with  a  considerable  number  of  your  own  countrymen.  (Applause.) 
But  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  British  government,  I  don’t  believe 
that  accusation  can  be  made  good.  All  the  great  administrators  of  Egypt 
have  given  their  time  and  their  labor  for  the  benefit  of  the  poorer  portion 
of  those  countries,  and  it  is  under  the  belief  that  we  were  doing  good 
that  we  remained  in  Egypt. 

Now  there  have  been  certain  conditions  made.  One  of  them  is  a 
condition  that  under  the  future  system  of  Egypt  the  rights  of  foreigners 
should  be  especially  respected.  Please  remember  that  Egypt  is  really  not 
a  little  country  that  the  world  can  afford  to  leave  alone  to  sow  its  wild 
oats.  That  is  what  Dr.  Gibbons  said  just  now.  He  likened  Egypt  to 
himself,  I  believe.  (Laughter.)  At  any  rate,  to  what  he  represented 
himself  to  be,  as  a  young  man  who  would  have  been  so  magnificently 
superior  to  what  he  is  now,  if  he  had  only  been  left  alone,  or  perhaps 
it  was  vice  versa,  I  don’t  exactly  remember.  (Laughter.)  But  at  any 
rate  his  argument  was :  “Leave  Egypt,  leave  Egyptians  alone ;  let  them 
be  as  we  were  in  Runnymede;  let  them  be  as  in  the  time  of  Joan  of  Arc.” 
I  assure  you,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  neither  Europe  nor  the  world  can 
afford  to  allow  Egypt  to  go  back  to  the  ages  of  Joan  of  Arc  or  of 
Runnymede.  (Applause.)  One  of  the  remarkable  features  of  Egypt  is 
this:  that  the  population  is  largely  European.  Lord  Milner’s  report 
stated  that  Egypt  was  rapidly  becoming  Europeanized.  Almost  all  of 
the  nations  of  Europe  have  interests  in  Egypt.  It  wouldn’t  be  wise 
to  allow  a  new  condition  of  affairs  to  spring  up  in  Egypt  in  which  Eg}^pt 
might  possibly  go  back  to  the  condition  in  which  it  was  prior  to  1882. 

I  know  that  my  time  is  very  limited,  and  therefore  I  cannot  make 
the  full  defense  I  would  like  to  make  of  the  present  attitude  of  the 
British  government.  I  am  not  a  supporter,  politically,  of  the  British 
government.  I  am  a  member  of  the  Liberal  party  and  have  been,  in 
Parliament  and  elsewhere,  always  connected  with  the  Liberal  party,  but 
I  must  say  this :  I  do  not  think  that  under  the  circumstances  any  govern¬ 
ment  could  have  acted  otherwise  than  it  did  in  relation  to  the  assassination 
of  Sir  Lee  Stack.  Mind  you,  we  have  not  yet  attained  a  position  in  which 
we  can  absolutely  disregard  all  resort  to  force.  I  am  an  ardent  believer 
in  the  League  of  Nations.  I  am  working  for  the  League  of  Nations. 
Some  day,  perhaps,  the  League  of  Nations  may  be  able  to  establish  itself 
as  a  police  force  for  the  whole  of  the  world.  That  is  possible  in  the  far 
distance.  We  have  not  arrived  at  that  yet,  and  therefore  there  are 
occasions  when  force  must  be  exerted,  and  on  this  occasion  it  was  clearly 
necessary.  There  was  a  cruel  assassination,  not  a  merely  isolated  incident. 
It  was  part  and  parcel  of  an  agitation  against  the  whole  British,  and 
indeed  I  may  say  against  the  whole  foreign  community  in  Egypt.  If  it 
had  been  allowed  to  go  on,  it  would  have  spread  with  far  more  serious 
results.  The  action  of  the  British  government  has  resulted  in  this:  with¬ 
out  shedding  a  drop  of  blood,  without  wounding  any  one,  without  doing 
any  harm,  we  succeeded  in  changing  the  government  of  Egypt  in  such  a 
form  that  they  are  willing  now  to  negotiate  with  us,  ready  for  a  permanent 
settlement  of  the  difficulties  in  Egypt.  Therefore,  in  that  respect,  I 
must  say  I  believe  the  British  government  acted  absolutely  right. 

18 


It  is  stated  the  action  was  so  illegal  that  it  ought  to  be  referred  to  the 
League  of  Nations.  That,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  is  a  question  one  can’t 
argue  before  a  great  meeting  here,  but  I  may  say  this,  that  in  my  opinion, 
there  is  only  one  way  in  which  it  could  come  before  the  League  of  Nations 
and  that  is  if  it  were  a  war  or  threat  of  war,  or  if  it  threatened  to  disturb 
international  relations. 

You  cannot  really  say  that  an  action  on  the  part  of  the  British  govern¬ 
ment  that  had  actual  rights  in  Egypt  to  restore  order  was  either  a  war  or 
a  threat  of  war.  There  might  have  been  some  circumstance  which  would 
disturb  international  relationships,  but  then  the  League  of  Nations  would 
or  would  not  take  that  into  consideration  as  it  might  think  well.  And 
in  my  opinion,  I  believe  that  the  League  of  Nations  should  be  very 
cautious  before  it  starts  doing  something  which  is  really  beyond  the 
immediate  scope  of  its  work  (namely,  to  keep  the  peace  between  distinct 
nations)  by  interfering  in  matters  which  are  clearly  of  a  domestic 
concern.  It  is  wiser  for  the  League  of  Nations  not  to  deal  with  this 
matter.  But  at  the  same  time,  personally,  I  may  give  as  my  own 
opinion  this:  I  think  the  time  has  arrived  when  not  only  Great  Britain 
but  all  the  nations  of  the  world,  should  realize  that  in  setting  up  an 
institution  like  the  League  of  Nations,  they  have  established  an  organ 
which  has  the  right  to  be  consulted  in  all  these  matters  of  international 
concern,  and  therefore  in  a  case  such  as  this,  when  the  permanent  arrange¬ 
ments  between  Egypt  and  England  and,  indeed,  the  rest  of  the  world 
have  to  be  settled,  I  believe  they  can  only  be  settled  on  a  definite  basis 
by  taking  into  consultation  the  League  of  Nations  and  the  whole  of  the 
world,  or  at  any  rate,  the  whole  of  those  nations  who  form  the  members 
of  the  League  of  Nations,  and  giving  them  an  opportunity  of  discussing 
and  considering  the  matter. 

I  still  hope  that  the  British  government  may  take  this  course.  I  see 
nothing  in  their  actions  up  to  the  present  moment  to  preclude  them  from 
doing  so.  If  they  do  so,  then  I  believe  there  will  be  an  opportunity 
of  finding  a  permanent  settlement,  and  the  only  thing  in  conclusion  that 
I  will  say  is  that  if  the  League  of  Nations  becomes,  as  I  am  sure  it  will 
become,  an  organ  for  devising  satisfactory  arrangements  for  regulating 
international  relations,  it  is  a  thousand  pities  that  among  those  who 
will  be  able  to  give  their  counsel  there  is  not  the  great  American  people 
on  this  side  of  the  water.  (Applause.) 

The  Chairman:  I  am  not  going  to  give  Dr.  Gibbons  a  chance  to 
reply.  I  am  afraid  he  would  be  almost  too  brilliant  in  his  reply,  but  I 
would  like  to  have  questions  now  addressed  to  any  of  the  speakers,  and 
perhaps  if  you  address  one  to  Mr.  Gibbons  he  may  steal  some  time  to 
say  a  word  or  two  in  answer  to  Sir  Willoughby.  But  I  would  rather  have 
questions;  as  you  know  we  do,  of  course,  have  speeches  occasionally  from 
the  floor  if  they  are  especially  good  ones  and  especially  brief  ones. 

Dr.  Joseph  Collins:  Assuming  that  the  Suez  Canal  is  essential  to 
the  life  of  the  British  Empire,  would  the  British  Empire  be  justified  in 
giving  to  the  Egyptians  the  advice  which  Dr.  Gibbons  suggested  that  he 
might  give  his  son,  knowing  that  perhaps  that  advice  would  not  only 
lead  the  son  to  destroy  himself  but  even  strangle  the  whole  family? 

Dr.  Gibbons  :  In  answer  to  that  I  would  say  simply  this :  in  making 
the  statement  that  I  made,  I  was  arguing  the  whole  general  question.  In 

19 


a  short  speech  of  twenty-five  minutes  it  is  impossible  for  one  to  go  into 
all  the  details  of  a  settlement  that  might  be  effected  between  Egypt  and 
Great  Britain. 

In  the  first  place,  I  might  say  that  we  are  unwarranted  in  supposing 
that  the  granting  of  independence  to  Egypt  would  strangle  the  British 
Empire.  That  has  yet  to  be  proven. 

In  the  second  place,  all  the  schemes  (even  those  of  Zaghlul  Pasha, 
who  did  go,  as  I  said,  to  extremes  during  the  course  of  the  last  year 
of  his  administration)  have  presupposed  that  Great  Britain  should  have 
the  right  to  continue  to  guard  the  Suez  Canal.  There  is  a  big  difference 
between  the  guarding  of  the  Suez  Canal — which  wasn’t  mentioned  in  the 
ultimatum,  as  it  was  understood  by  the  Egyptians  as  well  as  the  English 
—and  the  question  of  irrigation  in  the  Gezira  district  of  the  Sudan.  I 
want  to  be  perfectly  clear  here.  I  am  afraid  perhaps  some  of  you  may 
have  misunderstood  my  position.  In  the  year  1916,  when  I  had  gone 
to  Egypt  at  the  invitation  of  Sir  John  Maxwell  who  was  Commander 
of  the  British  forces  at  that  time,  I  worked  very  hard  to  get  from  the 
Sultan  of  Egypt,  and  I  did  secure  from  him,  an  interview  which  was 
of  great  usefulness  in  clearing  up  the  situation  at  that  time,  in  which 
the  Sultan  said  that  it  never  had  been  in  the  minds  of  the  Egyptian  people 
to  contest  the  special  position  of  Great  Britain  in  Egypt.  They  don’t 
contest  it  now,  and  they  never  would  for  one  minute  raise  any  obstacle, 
and  they  have  not  raised  any  such  obstacles,  to  Great  Britain  taking  the 
fullest  measures  possible  for  the  protection  of  herself  on  the  Suez  Canal. 
But  it  is  a  far  cry  from  the  Suez  Canal  and  the  protection  of  the  Suez 
Canal  by  a  great  power  like  Great  Britain  to  the  kind  of  a  control  that 
Great  Britain  has  exercised  over  Egypt  in  the  past,  and  to  the  complete 
fulfilment  of  all  the  demands  that  are  made  in  the  present  ultimatum. 

The  Chairman:  Both  the  question  and  the  answer  were  the  sort 
I  like— brief  and  to  the  point. 

Mr.  Bishara  Nahas — Mr.  Nahas  is  an  Egyptian  merchant. 

Mr.  Nahas  :  I  asked  to  put  a  question.  I  know  that  usually  ques¬ 
tions  are  not  answered  in  a  debate,  and  I  do  not  expect  my  questions 
to  be  answered.  I  am  going  to  take  opportunity  of  what  Mr.  McDonald, 
our  Chairman,  said,  that  we  can  have  a  short  speech,  if  it  is  short.  I 
will  try  to  make  it  very  short. 

When  Sir  Willoughby  was  speaking  about  the  Irish  woman  who  said, 
“We  can  fight  in  peace,”  it  reminded  me  of  an  Arab  proverb:  “My 
cousin  and  myself  are  enemies,  but  any  enemy  of  my  cousin  is  also 
my  enemy.” 

That  is  a  very  old  Arab  proverb. 

Adding  to  what  Dr.  Gibbons  said  about  England  saying  that  she  has 
always  wanted  to  leave  Egypt:  I  remember  a  few  years  ago  I  went 
to  see  the  barracks  occupied  by  the  English  soldiers  in  Egypt  near 
Alexandria,  and  I  was  shown  about  by  an  English  officer.  I  exclaimed, 
“But  there  is  no  electric  light  here !” 

With  a  twinkle  in  his  eye  he  said,  “You  see  we  are  here  temporarily 
and  we  intend  to  stay  temporarily  and  miake  no  improvement  in  the 
place.” 


20 


That  is  how  England  is  staying  in  Egypt.  She  is  there  temporarily 
and  does  not  intend  to  make  any  improvement. 

My  question  is  the  following :  What  right  has  England  to  be  in  Egypt  ? 
We  have  to  take  always  the  principle  of  any  question,  not  the  facts 
as  they  are  forty  or  forty-two  years  after  the  occupation.  Let’s  go  at 
the  bottom  of  it,  at  the  beginning  of  it.  What  right  today  has  England 
to  be  in  Egypt  ?  What  right  has  any  country  to  assume  that  another 
country  is  totally  unable  to  govern  itself  ?  Is  it  for  humanity’s  sake 
that  Great  Britain  is  in  Egypt?  For  civilization’s  sake?  I  say  that 
Egyptians  are  more  civilized  than  any  other  country  in  the  world,  any 
other  nationality.  They  are  a  very  old  civilization,  but  as  Dr.  Gibbons 
said,  they  are  a  different  civilization,  an  Eastern  civilization,  which  is 
totally  different  from  a  Western  civilization. 

I  contend  also,  is  it  unselfishness  for  England  to  remain  there  ?  England 
is  not  there  unselfishly.  No  country  goes  into  another  country  unselfishly. 
Perhaps  I  might  make  an  exception  of  what  the  United  States  has  done 
in  Cuba.  (Laughter.)  I  am  not  discussing  that  point  now.  The  great 
problem  is  the  Suez  Canal,  which  is  the  main  link  between  England 
and  her  colonies  in  India,  as  it  was  stated. 

And  then  the  second  question:  In  whose  name  Lord  Kitchener  has 
conquered  the  Sudan?  When  he  went  to  the  conquest  of  the  Sudan  in 
1898,  by  whom  was  he  appointed?  By  England?  But  whose  governor 
was  he?  Egypt’s.  It  was  in  the  name  of  Egypt.  We  know  that  from 
the  declaration  of  Lord  Kitchener  himself ;  and  the  statements  of  Lord 
Kimberly  also  later  in  the  House  of  Parliament  in  London.  They  are 
there  to  show  us  in  whose  name  the  Sudan  was  conquered,  when  the 
English  led  the  Egyptian  troops  to  the  conquest  of  the  Sudan.  Hicks 
Pasha  and  Gordon  Pasha  failed  first,  but  they  were  in  the  Sudan  not 
in  the  name  of  England,  they  were  in  the  Sudan  in  the  name  of  Egypt, 
and  they  were  paid  by  Egypt,  too,  adds  Dr.  Gibbons. 

Therefore,  my  questions  are  twofold:  First,  by  what  right  is  England 
in  Egypt,  and  in  whose  name  is  England  today  in  the  Sudan  ?  (Applause.) 

The  Chairman:  Well,  this  is  a  double-barreled  question.  I  think 
you  all  heard  it.  By  what  right  is  Britain  in  Egypt?  In  whose  name 
did  Kitchener  conquer  the  Sudan? 

I  was  just  discussing  the  answer  with  my  friends  to  the  right,  and 
I  am  going  to  ask  Ambassador  Morgenthau  if  he  won’t  answer  a  part 
of  this  question,  and  if  he  doesn’t  answer  it  adequately,  perhaps  one  of 
our  British  friends  will  complete  the  answer. 

Honorable  Henry  Morgenthau  :  Ladies  and  gentlemen :  I  was 
very  much  amused  when  I  heard  Professor  Gibbons  tell  about  his  son. 
The  professor  was  kind  enough  to  dedicate  a  book  to  me  not  long  ago, 
and  in  it  he  said  he  did  so  because  he  thought  that  through  my  experience 
(I  am  not  quoting  the  exact  words)  I  was  a  little  wiser  than  he.  I  have 
a  son  and  my  son  is  benefiting  by  and  adopting  my  experience.  (Ap¬ 
plause.)  That  is  all  I  am  going  to  say  about  this.  You  must  draw  the 
inference. 

Now,  my  friends,  I  have  been  in  Egypt,  and  I  found  out,  even  as  late 
as  1914,  that  the  aftermath  of  the  methods  and  way  Ismail  lived  and 
conducted  Egypt  was  still  felt.  He  had  put  that  country  into  bankruptcy. 
The  country,  financially  and  economically  was  ruined  by  him.  I  met 

21 


Abbas  Hilmi,  the  Khedive  of  Egypt.  I  had  a  very  interesting  talk  with 
him  in  Cairo,  and  numerous  talks  with  him  when  he  afterwards  occupied 
his  residence  on  the  Bosphorus,  which  was  directly  opposite  the  American 
summer  embassy.  All  through  those  conversations,  he  never  spoke  with 
any  solicitude  or  consideration  for  his  people.  It  was  simply  a  selfish 
attitude  of  the  owner  of  a  piece  of  property  who  wanted  to  know,  and 
calmly  considered  what  would  be  to  his  personal  advantage,  whether  to 
continue  to  cooperate  with  the  British  or  throw  himself  and  his  destinies 
into  the  hands  of  the  Turks.  He  decided  cold-bloodedly  that  the  Germans 
were  going  to  succeed  in  the  war,  and  therefore  he  concluded  to  side 
with  the  Turks  and  Germans. 

Now,  my  friends,  when  we  look  at  these  people,  we  mustn’t  think  of 
the  few  men  who  are  at  the  head  of  the  government.  The  Egyptian 
people  would  not  be  benefited  by  having  a  monarch  or  a  despot  rule 
over  them.  We  want  to  look  at  the  two  lines  of  thougth  at  present 
prevalent  in  this  country.  One  of  these  is  to  hold  aloof — remain  isolated 
— and  the  other  that  we  should  do  as  the  British  have  done- — be  the  pilots, 
the  reorganizers  of  weak  nations,  help  them.  It  is  a  wonderful  oppor¬ 
tunity.  I  have  been  fortunate  enough  to  go  to  Greece,  live  there  for  a 
while,  and  be  able  to  help  that  historic  country  back  to  her  feet.  Mr. 
Davis  is  sitting  here  in  our  midst.  He  went  out  and  settled  the  Memel 
dispute.  We  Americans  ought  to  applaud  and  approve  of  Great  Britain’s 
attitude.  We  are  not  ready,  nor  is  the  League  of  Nations  prepared, 
to  police  the  world,  but  Great  Britain  has  gone  into  these  various  parts 
of  the  globe  and  has  spent  her  money  and  her  men  to  bring  about  better 
conditions. 

Every  one  will  admit  that  backward  countries  cannot  have  democracies 
until  they  are  trained  to  it.  These  men  like  Ismail  Pasha  or  Abbas 
Hilmi,  or  his  brother,  Mehemet  Ali,  whom  I  met,  have  no  idea  of  giving 
their  people  democracies.  What  is  wanted  in  this  great  world  is  that 
the  intelligent  peoples,  the  advanced  countries,  should  help  the  others. 
Now,  it  is  all  very  nice  to  try  and  play  upon  that  feeling  that  we  all  have, 
that  we  should  help  the  under-dog.  You  are  not  helping  the  under-dog 
unless  you  really  extricate  him.  (Applause.)  Merely  to  say,  “Let  him 
stay  there ;  let  him  wallow  in  his  own  dirt ;  let  him  become  diseased ; 
let  him  disappear”  does  not  help  him.  I  tell  you  that  I  know  of  my 
personal  knowledge  that  the  British  have  helped  Egypt  and  that  the  mass 
of  Egyptians  who  are  not  fanatically  for  self-determination  are  very 
much  in  favor  of  having  a  protectorate,  and  I  had  the  same  experience 
with  the  Turks.  At  one  time  the  Turks  wanted  a  protector.  I  was  very 
much  astonished,  though,  when  I  asked  them,  “Suppose  we  don’t  accept 
a  mandate,  who  would  be  your  next  choice?”  I  believe  that  there  are  not 
ten  people  in  this  room  who  can  guess  their  choice.  They  told  me  the 
Japanese.  I  asked  them  why,  and  they  said  that  they  understood  their 
oriental  thoughts  and  methods. 

Now,  my  friends,  all  I  want  to  say  is  that  you  may  consider  that 
Great  Britain  may  have  made  a  mistake.  She  may  have  gone  too  far. 
But  I  believe  there  are  certain  times  when  we  must  withhold  our  judg¬ 
ment,  when  we  don’t  know  all  the  facts.  I  think  that  Great  Britain  has 
undertaken,  as  Kipling  put  it,  “the  white  man’s  burden,”  and  it  doesn’t 
behoove  us  Americans,  as  long  as  we  are  shirking  doing  our  share, 
to  criticize  Great  Britain.  (Applause.) 

22 


The  Chairman:  Sir  Willoughby  said  he  would  like  to  complete 
Ambassador  Morgenthau’s  reply  to  those  two  questions  which  were 
raised  by  our  Egyptian  friends,  the  one  as  to  Britain’s  right,  and  the 
other  as  to  in  whose  name  Kitchener  conquered  the  Sudan. 

Sir  Willoughby  Dickinson:  I  think,  Mr.  Chairman,  that  people 
really  ought  to  understand  quite  clearly  by  what  right  Britain 
is  in  Egypt  and  the  Sudan.  We  are  there  by  the  right  of  agreement 
with  Egypt.  Our  officers,  the  British  officers,  are  actually  appointed  by 
the  Egyptian  government  by  agreement  with  the  British.  Sir  Lee  Stack 
was  appointed  by  the  Egyptian  government.  General  Hoskins  was  ap¬ 
pointed  by  the  Egyptian  government.  It  has  been  hitherto  an  arrange¬ 
ment  for  the  benefit  of  both  parties,  accepted  by  both  parties,  and  now 
that  it  appears  that  the  Egyptian  nation  is  no  longer  in  favor  of  that 
agreement,  the  British  government  has,  as  I  have  pointed  out  to  you, 
announced  its  intention  of  handing  over  the  independence  to  Egypt  upon 
certain  definite  conditions.  Therefore  that  is  the  real  answer  with  re¬ 
gard  to  Egypt.  With  regard  to  the  Sudan,  as  General  Hoskins  has  said, 
the  Sudan  was  never  under  Egypt.  It  was  conquered  by  the  British 
officers  with  the  assistance  of  the  Egyptian  troops,  and  since  that  time, 
it  has  been  administered  again  in  agreement  with  the  Egyptian  govern¬ 
ment,  under  a  process  which  is  called  the  condominium.  So  that  changes 
the  situation  altogether,  and  although  the  situation  may  change  at  any 
time,  it  hasn’t  definitely  changed,  but  may  have  to  be  changed,  as  I 
have  pointed  out,  with  the  joint  consent  of  the  Egyptians  and  the  British 
government. 

Mr.  V.  Everit  Macy:  I  understand  that  the  question  of  the  Sudan 
is  one  of  the  important  points  dividing  England  and  Egypt.  I  would 
like  to  ask  Professor  Gibbons  whether  he  thinks  the  Sudanese,  who  I 
think  number  something  over  seven  millions,  and  occupy  a  territory  as 
large  as  the  United  States  east  of  the  Mississippi,  would  be  better  under 
the  Egyptian  government,  with  possibly  some  wild  oats,  or  under  the 
English  administration.  I  haven’t  heard  any  discussion  of  the  self-de¬ 
termination  of  the  Sudanese  as  yet. 

Dr.  Gibbons:  In  what  I  said  I  think  I  made  very  clear  that  I  never 
believed  for  one  minute  that  the  Egyptian  government  would  immediately 
or  within  a  very  short  time — perhaps  it  might  take  a  very  long  time — 
rule  themselves  as  well  and  as  effectively  as  the  British  are  able  to  rule 
them  with  centuries  behind  them  of  training  and  education.  I  have  been 
in  the  Sudan,  where  I  was  the  guest  of  Sir  Reginald  Wingate  in  Khartum, 
and  have  gone  over  the  whole  situation  with  Sir  Lee  Stack,  who  at  that 
time  was  associated  with  Sir  Reginald  Wingate  in  the  administration  of 
the  Sudan.  I  have  also  had  the  very  great  privilege  of  going  to  Omdur- 
man  as  one  of  thirty  Europeans  absolutely  without  arms  on  the  night 
of  the  birthday  of  the  Prophet  and  being  absolutely  safe  and  feeling 
safe  there  in  old  Omdurman  where  the  Mahdi’s  power  had  been  broken. 
I  have  always,  in  everything  that  I  have  written  and  everything  that  I 
have  said,  paid  the  very  fullest  tribute  to  the  British  administration. 
I  have  seen  a  great  deal  of  it,  I  have  lived  under  it,  and  have  been  with 
these  men,  and  have  generally  been  their  guests  everywhere  I  have  gone, 
and  I  have  the  very  fullest  admiration  for  their  administration.  I 
wouldn’t  for  one  minute  think  that  the  Egyptians  could  administer  the 

23 


Sudan  now  better  than  the  English.  However,  there  is  this  to  be  said : 
it  is  a  thing  to  be  remembered,  and  I  think  it  is  one  of  the  things  that 
divides  us  in  this  question  as  a  sort  of  unbridgeable  gulf.  (It  is 
manifest  in  what  Mr.  Morgenthau  has  said  in  his  answer  in  regard 
to  the  situation.)  It  is  the  old  argument  of  racial  superiority  that  has 
been  given  here  ever  since  the  beginning  of  this  talk,  as  to  whether  these 
people  would  be  better  off  and  what  kind  of  man  their  sovereign  was 
and  all  that  sort  of  thing.  I  admit  their  radical  difference  from  us — 
and  the  difference  between  their  civilization,  their  ideals,  if  you  wish — 
and  ours.  What  I  said  is  that  these  people  have,  as  our  Egyptian  friend 
has  pointed  out  in  what  he  has  said,  a  civilization  that  is  not  necessarily 
inferior  to  ours  because  it  is  different  from  ours  .  They  may  be  happier 
and  more  prosperous  and  like  to  live  in  their  way  better  than  in  our  way. 
Now  if  we  are  going  to  make  an  Occidental  country  of  the  Sudan,  by 
all  means  if  we  are  going  to  Occidentalize  the  world — Anglo-Saxonize 
the  world — let’s  not  only  stay  there,  but  increase  our  troops  and  increase 
our  personnel  and  run  the  country  according  to  our  western  methods. 
They  have  their  eastern  methods.  They  believe  that  they  are  civilized. 
We  don’t  think  that  they  are.  After  all,  in  the  final  analysis,  the  question 
boils  down  to  this — it  isn’t  our  country,  and  it  is  their  country. 

Mr.  Macy:  I  don’t  think  Professor  Gibbons  quite  answered  my  ques¬ 
tion. 

My  question  was  if  the  Sudanese  are  to  be  ruled  by  somebody  (he 
says  they  are  to  be  ruled  by  Egypt)  have  they  expressed  their  desire 
to  be  ruled  by  Egypt,  and  does  he  think  Egypt  would  rule  them  better 
than  England.  That  was  my  question  which  he  has  not  answered  yet. 

The  Chairman  :  Mr.  Macy  has  an  impression,  justifiable  or  otherwise, 
that  Dr.  Gibbons  didn’t  answer  the  Sudanese  part  of  the  question. 

Dr.  Gibbons:  I  shall  be  glad  to  answer  that.  We  have  to  realize  in 
regard  to  these  peoples  out  there  that  nationalism  doesn’t  mean  the  same 
thing  to  them  that  it  means  to  us.  Remember  that  the  people  of  Sudan 
are  people  who  have  the  same  religion  as  the  Egyptians.  Wherever  you 
go  in  the  East,  if  you  see  these  people  you  are  impressed  with  the  fact 
that  their  nationalist  movement  is  at  the  same  time  a  cultural  movement, 
as  all  nationalist  movements  have  been.  I  would  say  without  hesitation 
that  those  who  live  in  the  Sudan  who  are  educated,  the  educated  men  of 
the  Sudan,  the  heads  of  the  tribes  and  all  the  people  who  are  lettered, 
their  clergy  and  so  on,  do  not  desire  the  separation  from  Egypt.  On  the 
contrary  they  have  great  dreams  of  what  is  going  to  happen  to  the  future 
of  Islam  culturally  if  the  contact  with  Egypt  is  maintained. 

I  beg  to  submit  that  I  did  answer  the  part  of  Mr.  Macy’s  question  about 
whether  they  would  be  better  governed  by  the  English  than  by  the 
Egyptians.  They  would  be  better  governed  by  the  English  than  by  the 
Egyptians,  most  decidedly.  A  person  who  tried  to  answer  that  question 
in  any  other  way  would  be  foolish.  I  have  never  inferred,  in  anything 
I  said  this  afternoon,  that  I  thought  they  would  be  better  off  in  a  material 
way  under  Egyptian  than  English  rule.  The  point  is  that  there  is  a 
feeling  of  solidarity — a  very  strong  feeling  of  solidarity — among  the 
Islamic  peoples  today.  Are  they  going  to  be  allowed  an  opportunity  for 
the  development  of  their  peculiar  civilization  and  for  the  fitting  of  them¬ 
selves  into  the  scheme  of  things  in  the  twentieth  century  world,  or  are 

24 


they  going  to  continue  to  be  separated  and  governed  and  ruled  by  elder 
brothers  of  Occidental  civilization?  If  we  adopt  the  latter  scheme, 
in  a  material  way  (as  we  understand  material  blessings)  they  may  con¬ 
tinue  to  be  better  off  under  British  rule  than  under  their  own,  but  it 
requires  and  will  require  as  long  as  you  and  I  are  alive,  large  bodies  of 
troops  and  occasionally  repressive  measures,  if  we  are  going  to  check 
their  aspiration  to  rule  themselves. 

I  think  I  have  tried  to  answer  this  question  clearly.  The  Sudan  contains 
tribes  of  various  sorts  and  various  kinds,  but  most  of  them  do  belong  to 
Islam,  actually  or  potentially.  They  are  Mohammedans,  if  only  in  the 
making  and  their  Islamic  faith  is  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world  to  them — 
especially  to  the  neophytes.  They  look  upon  the  Egyptians  as  brothers 
because  the  Egyptians  are  also  of  the  Islamic  faith  and  their  nationalism 
is  more  understandable  to  the  Sudanese  than  our  nationalism,  or  than  our 
political  institutions  and  system  of  justice.  In  a  large  part  as  they 
become  educated  they  learn  to  speak  the  same  language,  and  there  is 
a  cultural  basis  for  the  nationalist  movement  among  the  Islamic  peoples 
that  we  would  be  very  foolish  to  ignore  when  we  consider  the  problem 
of  how  we  are  going  to  deal  with  them  in  the  future.  (Applause.) 

The  Chairman:  Now  there  is  somebody  in  my  immediate  neigh¬ 
borhood  who  said  that  most  of  the  latter  part  of  Dr.  Gibbons’  talk 
just  now  was  inaccurate,  and  I  am  wondering  whether  she  would  agree 
to  say  so  publicly. 

Mrs.  Marguerite  Harrison  :  I  have  just  returned  from  a  trip  to 
the  East,  and  I  have  found  everywhere  that  I  have  been  in  Turkey, 
Persia  and  Arabia  that  Islamic  solidarity  no  longer  exists.  Dr.  Gibbons, 
it  is  a  myth,  nationalism  to  a  large  extent  has  taken  its  place.  Don’t 
you  believe  that  the  antagonism  between  the  Sudanese  and  the  Egyptians 
is  such,  racially  and  otherwise,  that  the  Sudanese,  who  as  you  admit 
will  have  to  be  ruled  by  somebody,  would  prefer  to  be  ruled  by  Great 
Britain  rather  than  be  ruled  by  the  Egyptians?  Personally  I  think 
so.  I  would  like  to  ask  your  opinion.  I  would  also  like  to  have 
you  state  if  you  think  there  is  any  evidence  of  Islamic  solidarity  in  the 
action  of  Ib’n  Saud,  leader  of  the  Wahabis,  a  Mohammedan  sect,  who 
took  Mecca  recently  and  drove  out  Husein  of  Hedjaz,  Khali f  and  Sheri f 
of  Mecca. 

The  Chairman:  Mrs.  Marguerite  Harrison  whom  many  of  us  know, 
and  who  has  just  returned  from  the  Near  East,  asks  Dr.  Gibbons  whether 
he  hasn’t  overstressed  the  solidarity  of  Islam  and  whether  nationalism  is 
not  cutting  across  it,  and  whether  therefore  the  national  feeling  of  the 
Sudanese  and  their  hatred  on  various  grounds  of  the  Egyptians  would 
not  be  greater  than  their  feeling  of  a  common  bond  of  religion.  She 
would  like  to  have  Dr.  Gibbons’  opinion  of  that. 

Dr.  Gibbons:  I  have  never  believed  in  the  solidarity  of  Islam  in  the 
sense  that  it  has  been  so  often  written  of  by  a  great  many  political 
writers,  that  is,  as  a  bugaboo  for  European  diplomacy  and  extra-European 
expansion.  I  have  pointed  that  out  clearly  and  frequently  in  all  I  have 
written.  The  question  I  speak  of  is  something  different.  Solidarity 
in  Islam,  that  Islamic  peoples  should  consider  one  another  as  brothers, 
is  no  more  natural  than  that  all  the  Christian  peoples  should  consider 
one  another  as  brothers.  There  was  no  solidarity  of  Christendom  when 

25 


they  said  naughty  things  about  the  Germans  and  the  Germans  said  just 
as  naughty  things  about  us.  There  is  no  solidarity  of  Islam  in  that 
sense,  there  couldn’t  be,  it  isn’t  in  the  nature  of  human  relations.  What 
I  say  is  simply  this,  that  the  cultural  bonds  that  unite  the  Islamic  peoples 
today  in  their  state  of  what  I  might  call  embryonic  nationalism,  because 
it  has  hardly  attained  to  more  than  that,  is  a  factor  that  we  have  to 
reckon  with  in  regard  to  the  future  and  it  is  also  a  fact  that  must  be 
reckoned  with  among  peoples,  a  large  majority  of  whom  are  unlettered. 
The  influence  of  their  leaders  is  very  strong  upon  them. 

As  to  the  illustration  that  Mrs.  Harrison  gives,  the  revolutions  and 
civil  strife  among  these  people,  they  do  fight  among  themselves.  All 
races  and  creeds  do.  But  let  us  remember  this,  that  as  we  look  at  the 
map  of  the  world  today,  in  all  these  nascent  movements  toward  national¬ 
ism  in  Islamic  countries,  there  is  a  common  bond  that  unites  them. 
Nationalism  hasn’t  cut  across  the  great  fact  that  they  are  all  of  them 
under  the  control  of,  and  they  all  of  them  believe  that  they  are  being 
exploited  by  the  nations  of  Europe.  Whether  they  are  or  not,  they 
believe  it  and  the  thing  a  person  thinks  is  the  thing  that  really  counts. 
Occidental  civilization,  as  expressed  in  the  Near  East  and  in  Africa,  by 
holding  these  people  in  tutelage,  is  growing  increasingly  hateful.  The 
moment  they  try  to  break  their  bonds,  there  is  a  common  solidarity 
in  the  common  struggle  against  European  lordship  and  the  pretension  to 
domination  of  so-called  Christian  civilization. 

It  is  a  solidarity  not  so  much  of  Islam  as  the  fact  that  all  these  Islamic 
lands,  one  after  another,  side  by  side,  are  under  the  control  of  European 
nations,  and  most  of  them  under  the  control  of  Great  Britain.  Even 
Saud  in  his  present  revolt,  of  which  Mrs.  Harrison  spoke,  contrary 
to  being  an  argument  on  her  side  is  an  argument  just  the  opposite.  It 
is  because  the  Sherif  Husein  of  Mecca,  elevated  there  as  king  by 
European  diplomacy,  was  thought  to  be  a  tool  of  the  British  Imperial 
aims  that  the  Wahabis  took  the  action  that  they  have  against  him. 
Students  of  Islamic  countries  realize  that.  We  can  cite  also  the  revolt 
of  the  Sudanese  battalion  in  the  Sudan,  which  is  symptomatic.  I  have 
talked  'to  a  good  many  of  these  Sudanese.  I  would  say  this  about  the 
people  of  Sudan,  that  they  are  near  the  possibility  of  rapprochement 
with  Egypt  in  the  future — it  won’t  come  right  away.  None  of  these 
things  come  right  away.  We  can’t  expect  these  people  to  form  a  solid 
nationality  or  to  work  out  their  destiny  in  the  way  that  we  would  approve 
in  a  few  years,  any  more  than  we  could  have  expected  the  English  and 
Scotch  to  get  together  in  a  few  years.  They,  too,  will  have  to  have 
centuries  of  border  raids  before  they  finally  agree  to  come  together  and 
to  form  a  common  nation. 

This  Sudanese  battalion  revolt  is  an  illustration  of  the  beginning  of  a 
movement  of  solidarity  among  these  people.  I  think  that  if  you  would 
take  the  opinion  of  the  Sudanese  today,  it  would  be  against  breaking  the 
present  system  that  controls  them,  that  is  the  condominium  of  England 
and  Egypt.  They  are  not  ready  to  fall  on  the  necks  of  the  Egyptians — 
I  wouldn’t  say  that — but  at  the  same  time  they  don’t  want  to  be  separated 
completely  from  Egypt  and  have  a  border  across  which  there  can  be  no 
communications,  because  if  that  were  done,  it  would  break  one  of  the 
great  hopes  that  the  Islamic  peoples  have  today  of  arriving  by  cultural 

26 


improvement  at  a  future  solidarity  that  perhaps  might  be  called  more 
cultural  than  purely  political.  Of  course  they  will  continue  to  fight 
among  themselves,  and  I  don’t  believe  in  the  Pan-Islamic  movement  and 
never  have,  but  I  think  that  the  seeds  of  nationalism  there,  viewing  the 
fact  that  the  Sudan  and  Egypt  are  side  by  side,  could  possibly  and  might 
in  the  course  of  a  generation  or  two  work  out  to  the  improvement  and 
betterment  both  of  the  Egyptian  and  Sudanese  people. 

In  Czecho-Slovakia  right  today  you  have  an  illustration  of  what  I 
mean.  Take  the  Slovaks  at  the  Peace  Conference.  If  the  argument  had 
been  brought  up  at  that  time,  that  the  Slovaks  should  have  a  plebiscite 
to  decide  whether  they  wanted  to  be  ruled  over  by  the  Czechs,  they 
would  have  voted  against  it,  a  great  many  of  them;  but  it  is  the  hope 
of  the  Czecho-Slovak  state  that  these  people  will  come  together  in  the 
course  of  time. 

The  Chairman:  I  am  a  little  embarrassed.  We  have  twelve  minutes 
more  at  the  outside.  I  have  a  most  interesting  letter  here  from  a  very 
distinguished  scholar,  who  puts  an  interesting  point  of  view,  and  I  have 
suggestions  from  two  or  three  interesting  persons  who  might  speak  for 
a  couple  of  minutes  each.  Perhaps  I  might  read  this  letter  first. 

This  is  a  letter — Dr.  Gibbons  told  me  to  say  that  both  he  and  General 
Hoskins  agree  with  this  letter,  and  the  General  qualifies  it  a  little  by 
saying  in  general  he  agrees  with  it — from  Captain  William  Yale,  who 
was  for  six  years  in  the  Near  East,  and  a  special  agent  of  the  State 
Department,  was  associated  with  the  Near  Eastern  Division  of  the  Peace 
Conference,  was  two  years  in  business  in  Cairo  and  at  Port  Said.  He 
says : 

“Our  topic  for  discussion  this  afternoon,  British  Policy  in  Egypt, 
has  been  overshadowed  by  a  greater  and  broader  question,  imperialism 
versus  nationalism.  The  British  policy  in  Egypt  past  and  present,  is  a 
very  definite  and  tangible  subject,  one  which  is  well  worth  the  careful 
study  of  all  of  us  who  are  interested  in  statecraft.  It  throws  a  searching 
light  on  British  ideals,  British  mentality  and  British  policies,  as  well  as 
giving  us  a  glimpse  of  oriental  methods  and  ideas.  But  our  discussion 
of  imperialism  versus  nationalism  leads  to  little  more  than  an  occasion 
for  British  repartee. 

“The  British  Empire  today  like  the  rest  of  the  political  world  is  in  a 
state  of  flux.  To  such  a  degree  is  this  true  that  it  is  difficult  to  say 
whether  or  not  the  British  policy  in  Egypt  is  or  is  not  a  manifestation 
of  imperialism'.  Certainly  the  Egyptian  problem  is  for  Great  Britain 
an  imperial  problem  and  in  consequence  her  policy  in  Egypt  is  of  necessity 
one  which  takes  into  consideration  the  problems  of  the  Empire  as  a 
whole. 

“One  of  these  considerations  is  the  security  of  the  Empire’s  line  of 
communication.  It  is  self-evident  that  the  life  of  the  British  Empire 
depends  absolutely  upon  a  secure  control  of  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar  and 
the  Suez  Canal,  and  it  is  perfectly  clear  that  Great  Britain  will  and 
must  follow  a  policy  in  Egypt  calculated  to  give  her  this  control  until 
such  time  as  an  international  organization  will  develop  with  such  supreme 
powers  as  to  adequately  protect  these  lines  of  communication.  Such  a 
time  is  in  the  far  distance  as  long  as  Russia,  Germany  and  the  United 
States  remain  outside  the  League  of  Nations.  The  existence  of  Egypt 

27 


is  one  thing.  The  security  of  the  British  Empire  is  quite  another.  The 
British  Empire  is  a  political  factor  of  world-wide  importance,  and  I 
believe  that  there  are  few  in  this  gathering  who  would  care  to  see  this 
great  world  force  for  law  and  order  jeopardized  by  the  so-called  national¬ 
ism  of  14,000,000  Egyptians.  (Applause.) 

“This  so-called  Egyptian  nationalism,  is  it  nationalism  or  is  it  something 
else?  Certainly  the  claim  of  the  Egyptian  nationalist  to  the  Sudan  has 
as  much  relation  to  nationalism  as  would  a  demand  by  us  to  annex  Canada. 
It  is  stark  imperialism,  but  why?  There  is  beneath  this  demand  of  the 
Egyptians  for  the  Sudan  something  other  than  a  fear  lest  the  water  of 
the  Nile  be  withheld  from  the  fields  of  Egypt.  This  something  else 
is  something  of  very  great  importance,  it  is  nothing  less  than  the  struggle 
for  Africa. 

“Ladies  and  gentlemen,  there  is  a  struggle  going  on  in  Africa  today  of 
vast  importance  to  us  of  the  Western  World.  Its  outcome  we  cannot 
foresee,  but  its  significance  we  should  not  fail  to  grasp.  It  is  not  so 
much  a  territorial  struggle  to  see  who  shall  possess  Africa,  for  the 
Islamic  and  Oriental  powers  are  far  from  strong  enough  to  wage  such 
a  struggle,  but  it  is  a  struggle  to  determine  whether  Oriental  or  Western 
culture  shall  predominate  in  Africa.  Already  in  Kenia,  British  East 
Africa,  the  Indians  have  made  their  demands  of  the  British,  while  for 
a  number  of  years  the  inner  councils  of  Islam  have  been  pressing  the 
penetration  of  Central  Africa.  Encompassed  by  Christian  powers,  the 
Moslems  have  realized  sooner  than  we  have  that  their  only  chance  of 
expansion  lies  among  the  blacks  of  Central  Africa,  and  the  key  to  Central 
Africa  is  the  Sudan. 

“The  Egyptian  people  were  offered  by  the  British  declaration  of  1922 
a  fairly  liberal  charter  upon  which  to  build  an  independent  national  state, 
but  the  extremist  leaders  preferred  to  make  their  foundation  on  their 
own  form  of  religious  imperialism,  for  the  unfettered  control  of  the 
Sudan  by  the  Egyptians  would  have  given  Islam  a  new  and  stronger 
foothold  in  Africa.  But  then  it  must  be  remembered  that  in  Egypt 
nationalism  is  gauged  by  the  forces  of  religious  enthusiasm  upon  which 
it  depends.  There  is  no  distinctive  Egyptian  culture.  The  arts,  the 
language,  the  literature  and  the  ideals  are  those  of  Islam,  and  so  the 
nationalism  of  Egypt  is  mostly  the  nationalism  of  Islam.  Thus,  the 
struggle  in  Egypt  is  incorrectly  described  as  a  struggle  between  imperial¬ 
ism  and  nationalism.  It  is  rather  a  struggle  between  the  cultural  im¬ 
perialism  of  Islam  and  the  commercial  and  political  imperialism  of  the 
Western  World.”  (Applause.) 

Now  having  read  that,  I  am  going  to  give  two  members  of  the  Islam 
world  a  chance  with  two  minutes  each  to  say  what  they  think  about  it. 
If  Mr.  Hossain  will  come  up  here  and  say  in  two  minutes  what  he 
thinks  about  the  cultural  imperialism  of  Islam,  we  will  be  glad  to  give 
it  to  him.  Mr.  Hossain,  many  of  you  know,  a  scholar  and  a  friend 
from  India  whom  we  are  always  glad  to  welcome!  (Applause.) 

Mr.  Syud  Hossain  :  Mr.  Chairman,  ladies  and  gentlemen :  In  the 
two  minutes  allotted  to  me,  I  should  first  like  to  occupy  myself  with  an 
affirmation  of  principle.  It  seems  to  me  very  important  that  in  these 
discussions  too  much  detail  and  special  pleading  for  or  against  any  propo¬ 
sition  should  not  be  allowed  entirely  to  obscure  the  fundamental  principles 

28 


involved.  I  should  like,  as  a  representative  of  the  East,  to  put  before 
you  this  simple  affirmation.  The  points  of  view  to  which  expression 
have  been  given  by  three  distinguished  speakers  to  the  right  of  the 
Chairman  are  points  of  view,  in  so  far  as  they  apply  to  principles,  which 
are  utterly  repudiated  by  the  East. 

Mr.  Morgenthau’s  notion  of  the  needs  of  the  under-dog  and  the 
paternal  beneficence  which  the  under-dog  in  the  East  has  always  had 
at  the  hands  of  the  paternal  governments  of  the  West,  is  a  point  of 
view  which  perhaps  will  find  very  little  endorsement  from  any  under¬ 
dogs  anywhere. 

The  usefulness  of  these  discussions  for  which  the  Foreign  Policy 
Association  has  earned  a  well-merited  reputation,  lies  in  the  fact  that 
we  are  all  of  us  today  in  the  world  groping  in  our  respective  ways  for 
peace.  In  this  country  more  particularly  one  of  the  most  universal  and 
one  of  the  most  laudable  aspirations  today  is  an  aspiration  to  achieve 
an  enduring  and  just  peace  in  the  world.  (Applause.) 

It  is  precisely  against  this  background  of  the  need  for  world  peace 
that  these  questions  have  to  be  considered.  You  have  got,  ladies  and 
gentlemen,  in  this  country,  to  realize  that  this  whole  assumption  that  the 
West  has  any  kind  of  a  providential  duty  laid  upon  it  to  go  and  grab  the 
East  and  force  its  own  ideas  of  life  upon  the  East,  is  fundamentally 
fallacious.  It  has  already  involved  the  world  in  colossal  slaughter  and 
immeasurable  suffering.  According  to  the  statistics  issued  by  your  State 
Department  in  the  last  great  war,  10,000,0(30  young  men,  belonging  to 
all  the  nations  of  the  world,  to  your  nation  and  my  nation  and  other 
nations,  were  offered  up  as  a  sacrifice  at  the  altar  of  European  imperial¬ 
ism.  Do  you  want  that  kind  of  thing  to  go  on?  Is  the  only  possible 
condition  for  us  different  nations  and  peoples  in  the  world  to  live,  that 
we  should  periodically  engage  in  fratricidal  slaughter?  The  moral 
foundation  that  the  West  has  in  the  East  is  nil.  The  only  basis  for 
domination  of  the  East  is  that  the  West  has  been  able  to  harness  the 
destructive  powers  of  modern  science  to  the  business  of  imperialism.  It 
has  no  moral  foundation. 

I  should  just  like  to  close  with  an  attempt  at  an  answer  to  the  question 
that  was  put  from  this  table  by  Mr.  Nahas,  a  question  which,  as  Mr. 
Nahas  himself  anticipated,  was  not  answered.  He  asked  what  was  the 
justification  of  the  British  being  in  Egypt  and  he  asked  in  whose  name 
they  were  in  Egypt.  I  think  the  answer  to  that  question,  curiously  enough, 
may  perhaps  be  best  given  in  the  words  of  an  American. 

It  happened  that  Mark  Twain  was  in  England  at  the  time  of  Queen 
Victoria’s  Jubilee  when  great  celebrations  were  going  on,  great  jollifica¬ 
tion  and  all  the  rest.  Mark  Twain  being  a  simple  American  democrat 
was  rather  impressed  and  even  puzzled  by  these  demonstrations,  so  he 
gave  a  little  thought  to  the  matter  and  in  his  journal  he  wrote.  These 
are  the  words  taken  from  his  journal : 

“Victoria  rules  over  one-fourth  of  the  habitable  area  of  the  globe. 
Victoria  rules  over  one-fifth  of  the  population  of  the  world,  which  reminds 
me  that  the  British  are  mentioned  in  the  Bible:  ‘Blessed  are  the  meek, 
for  they  shall  inherit  the  earth’.” 

So  the  answer  to  Mr.  Nahas  is  that  it  is  this  quality  of  invincible 
meekness  that  has  installed  the  British  in  Egypt.  (Applause.) 

29 


The  Chairman:  I  think  I  have  changed  my  mind.  I  won’t  call 
on  the  other  Easterner.  The  time  is  up,  except  that  I  have  told  Sir 
Willoughby  or  General  Hoskins  that  I  would  be  glad  if  either  of  them 
would  care  to  close  the  discussion,  in  a  very  few  minutes,  and  when 
I  do  this,  I  apologize  to  my  other  friend  from  the  East  and  three  or 
four  other  people  whom  I  would  have  asked  to  speak  if  we  had  had  time. 

(There  were  calls  from  the  audience  to  hear  the  Easterner.) 

The  other  Easterner  that  I  was  going  to  call  on  is  an  old  friend 
of  ours,  Mufty-Zade  Iv.  Zia  Bey,  a  Turk  who  has  spoken  for  us  before 
(Applause.) 

Mufty-Zade  K.  Zia  Bey:  I  don’t  want  to  take  even  two  minutes  of 
your  valuable  time.  I  am  glad,  however,  of  this  opportunity  to  say  a 
few  words,  because  I  wouldn’t  want  to  leave  this  meeting  with  the  im¬ 
pression  that  the  majority  of  the  Turks,  or  even  any  amount  of  Turks 
that  really  would  count,  would  ask  or  desire  any  control  either  by 
Britain  or  Japan.  There  might  have  been,  undoubtedly  there  were  some 
people  who  expressed  that  opinion  to  Mr.  Morgenthau,  but  unfortunately 
there  might  be  traitors  in  any  country,  so  those  were  counted  amongst 
them.  The  fact  that  the  majority  of  Turks  did  not  want  any  such  control 
has  been  best  answered,  I  think,  on  the  plains  of  Anatolia. 

I  want  also  just  to  put  a  question  into  your  minds  that  I  would  like 
you  to  study  and  give  it  an  answer  by  yourselves.  When  we  hear  about 
the  white  man’s  burden,  if  we  think  of  the  situation,  prosperity,  education, 
art,  knowledge  of  science  and  so  forth,  of  the  East  long  before  the 
Westerners  considered  their  burden  to  help  the  East,  we  probably  would 
start  to  wonder  if  really  the  Western  man,  the  white  man,  has  a  burden, 
or  is  a  burden.  (Laughter.) 

The  Chairman:  As  a  Westerner,  I  am  almost  glad  there  aren’t  any 
more  of  these  Easterners  around.  General  Hoskins  will  close  the  discus¬ 
sion  in  three  or  four  minutes. 

General  Hoskins:  I  shan’t  take  up  any  time,  ladies  and  gentlemen. 
We  have  learned  something  from  every  speaker.  From  many  of  them 
I  have  learned  a  great  deal,  things  that  we  all  should  know,  what  are 
in  other  people’s  minds  and  they  have  been  frank  enough  (laughter),  but 
what  I  would  say,  just  by  way  of  closing  is,  let  us  beware  of  theorizing. 
Remember  the  man  that  has  to  do  the  job  practically.  Let  us  beware 
of  words  like  imperialism.  There  is  good  imperialism  and  there  is  bad. 
All  those  sort  of  catch  words  and  catch  phrases  can  trip  us  up ;  we 
have  to  get  down  really  further  than  that  sort  of  thing.  I  believe  that 
out  of  this  is  going  to  come  in  Egypt  a  moderate  party,  and  that  is  the 
great  hope,  and  if  that  moderate  party  of  nationalists  comes,  we  shall 
very  soon  arrive  at  a  conclusion  with  them  which  will  be  the  beginning 
of  England  getting  out  of  Egypt.  As  for  the  Sudan,  we  didn’t  hear  much 
about  the  self-determination  of  the  Sudanese.  Just  picture  it  and  re¬ 
member  the  Arabs  would  get  the  better  of  the  Sudanese  at  once.  We 
should  go  back  to  the  slave  trade.  Does  America  want  that ?  (Applause.) 


[The  Meeting  Adjourned  at  4  o’clock] 


30 


EGYPT  AND  THE  SUDAN 


From  “Egypt,  The  Sudan  and  The  Nile”,  by  Judge  Pierre  Crabites,  in  Foreign  Affairs, 
New  York,  December  15,  1924. 


The  AngloEgyptian  Sudan  with  an  area  in  round  numbers  of 
950,000  square  miles,  is  approximately  as  large  as  the  United  States 
east  of  the  Mississippi  river.  It  equals  the  combined  areas  ot 

France,  the  British  Isles,  Italy,  Spain,  Norway  and  Germany. 

31 


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